Articles by Chris Hedges - Truthdig

We found 34 results.


Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests: Only the Struggle Matters
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 8 Apr 2019

1 Apr 2019 — The uprising in the streets of Paris illustrates the importance of resisting corporate oppression, no matter what the outcome.

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Banishing Truth
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 31 Dec 2018

24 Dec 2018 – The decay of American journalism, captured by corporate power, has marginalized and often silenced its most courageous reporters. Investigative journalism depends not only on reporters such as Hersh, but as importantly on men and women inside the systems of power who have the moral courage to expose lies and make public crimes.

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Neoliberalism’s Dark Path to Fascism
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 3 Dec 2018

26 Nov 2018 – The financial elites have engineered a monumental con job that threatens to rip away the remainder of our freedoms. Neoliberalism transforms freedom for the many into freedom for the few. Its logical result is neofascism, which abolishes civil liberties in the name of national security and brands whole groups as traitors and enemies of the people.

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The Deadly Rule of the Oligarchs
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 19 Feb 2018

Once oligarchs take power, rational, prudent and thoughtful responses to social, economic and political problems are ignored to feed insatiable greed.

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The Abuses of History
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 2 Oct 2017

24 Sep 2017 – Historians, like journalists, are in the business of manipulating facts. Some use facts to tell truths, however unpleasant. But many more omit, highlight and at times distort them in ways that sustain national myths and buttress dominant narratives. History is what the present chooses to remember about the past.

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The Mafia State
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 12 Dec 2016

The later years—George W. Bush and Barack Obama—are marked by declarations that things are getting better even though they are getting worse. The final years—Donald Trump—see the lunatic trolls, hedge fund parasites, con artists, conspiracy theorists and criminals drop all pretense and carry out an orgy of looting and corruption… We will remove them from power or enter a new dark age.

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The Intellectuals We Abandon
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 12 Sep 2016

The great writers—Marcel Proust, Anton Chekhov, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Max Weber, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin and others—knew that thought is subversive. They challenged and critiqued the dominant narrative, assumptions and structures that buttress power. They freed us. They did not cater to the latest fashion of the academy or popular culture. They did not seek adulation. They did not build pathetic monuments to themselves. They elucidated difficult and hard truths. They served humanity. They lifted up voices the power elites seek to discredit, marginalize or crush.

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The American Empire: Murder Inc.
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 11 Jan 2016

The Bible says they sow the wind, they shall reap the whirlwind. Well, usually that isn’t true. It’s not true most of the time. It’s like the other slogan: The people united will never be defeated. Not true. The people united get defeated all the time. They get crushed. They get massacred. They get thrown into mass graves. But sometimes you sow the wind and you do reap the whirlwind. And that’s what’s happening now to the West with ISIS.

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The Terror We Give Is the Terror We Get
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 16 Feb 2015

Both ISIS and the West revel in brutality that feeds the fever for war. The line that separates us from our enemies is technological, not moral. We are those we fight.

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50 Years after His Death [21 Feb]: Malcolm X Was Right about America
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 16 Feb 2015

Malcolm X is the best medicine against genocide. He showed us by example and prophetic preaching that one does not have to stay in the mud. We can wake up; we can stand up; and we can take that long walk toward freedom. Freedom is first and foremost an inner recognition of self-respect, a knowledge that one was not put on this earth to be a nobody. Using drugs and killing each other are the worst forms of nobodyness.

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All Forms of Life Are Sacred
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 12 Jan 2015

What gives man the right to kill an animal, often torture it, so that he can fill his belly with its flesh? The battle for the rights of animals is not only about animals. It is about us. Once we desanctify animals we desanctify all life.

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Israel Is Captive to Its ‘Destructive Process’
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 21 Jul 2014

A mass movement demanding boycotts, divestment and sanctions is the only hope now for the Palestinian people. Such a movement must work for imposition of an arms embargo on Israel; this is especially important for Americans because weapons systems and attack aircraft provided by the U.S. are being used to carry out the assault.

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The Power of Imagination
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 19 May 2014

The lusts of capitalism will have to be tamed or destroyed. And there will have to be a recovery of reverence for the sacred, the bedrock of premodern society, so we can see each other and the earth not as objects to exploit but as living beings to be revered and protected.

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Feeding the Flame of Revolt
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 25 Nov 2013

I was in federal court in NYC on 15 Nov 2013 for the sentencing of Jeremy Hammond to 10 years in prison.“The hypocrisy of ‘law and order’ and the injustices caused by capitalism cannot be cured by institutional reform but through civil disobedience and direct action,” Hammond told the court. “Yes, I broke the law, but I believe that sometimes laws must be broken in order to make room for change.”

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Imploding the Myth of Israel
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 11 Nov 2013

Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that rivals the brutality and racism of apartheid South Africa. Its democracy—which was always exclusively for Jews—has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country toward fascism.

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The Sparks of Rebellion
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 7 Oct 2013

Emma Goldman, along with Kropotkin, came to be very wary of both the efficacy of violence and the revolutionary potential of the masses. “The mass,” Goldman wrote bitterly toward the end of her life in echoing Marx, “clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify!”

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The Act of Killing
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 30 Sep 2013

I have spent time with mass killers, warlords and death squad leaders as a reporter in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Some are psychopaths who relish acts of sadism, torture and murder. But others, maybe most, see killing as a job, a profession, good for their careers and status. Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary “The Act of Killing,” which took eight years to make, is an important exploration of the complex psychology of mass murderers.

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The Origins of Our Police State
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 23 Sep 2013

As in most police states, cops serve as judge and jury on city streets—“a long step down the totalitarian path,” in the words that U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote in 1968 when he decried expanding police powers.

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Locking Out the Voices of Dissent
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 22 Jul 2013

The rear-guard effort by a handful of activists to protect our rights to be heard and peaceably assemble is perhaps the most crucial, though unseen, struggle we currently are engaged in with the corporate state. It is a struggle to salvage what is left of our civil society and our right to nonviolent resistance against corporate tyranny.

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Murder Is Our National Sport
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 20 May 2013

The deeper our empire sinks under the weight of its own decay and depravity, the more we kill.

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The Day That TV News Died
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 1 Apr 2013

I am not sure exactly when the death of television news took place. The descent was gradual—a slide into the tawdry, the trivial and the inane, into the charade on cable news channels such as Fox and MSNBC in which hosts hold up corporate political puppets to laud or ridicule, and treat celebrity foibles as legitimate news.

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The Shame of America’s Gulag
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 25 Mar 2013

If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey.

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Mumia Abu-Jamal: The Unsilenced Voice of a ‘Long-Distance Revolutionary’
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 10 Dec 2012

I am sitting in the visiting area of the SCI Mahanoy prison in Frackville, Pa., on a rainy, cold Friday morning with Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s most famous political prisoner and one of its few authentic revolutionaries. “I didn’t see children for 30 years on death row,” he says softly. “It is a delight to see them here. They are what is most precious, what the struggle is finally about.”

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The Science of Genocide
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 13 Aug 2012

It was science, industry and technology that made possible the 20th century’s industrial killing. These forces magnified innate human barbarity. They served the immoral. And there are numerous scientists who continue to work in labs across the country on weapons systems that have the capacity to exterminate millions of human beings. Is this a “rational” enterprise? Is it moral? Does it advance the human species? Does it protect life?

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The Careerists
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 30 Jul 2012

The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. The droughts rage over cropland. The drones deliver death from the sky. The state moves inexorably forward to place us in chains. The sick die. The poor starve. The prisons fill. And the careerist, plodding forward, does his or her job.

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Northern Light
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 11 Jun 2012

The streets of Montreal are clogged nightly with as many as 100,000 protesters banging pots and pans and demanding that the old systems of power be replaced. There still is time to act. There still are mass movements to join. If the street protests in Quebec, the most important resistance movement in the industrialized world, spread to all of Canada and reach the United States, there remains the possibility of hope.

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This Hero Didn’t Stand a Chance
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 20 Jun 2011

Tim DeChristopher is scheduled to be sentenced in a Salt Lake City courtroom by U.S. District Judge Dee Benson on July 26. He faces up to 10 years in prison and a $750,000 fine for fraudulently bidding in December 2008 on parcels of land, including areas around eastern Utah’s national parks, which were being sold off by the Bush administration to the oil and natural gas industry.

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Throw Out the Money Changers
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 25 Apr 2011

The two most destructive forces of human nature—greed and envy—drive the financiers, the bankers, the corporate mandarins and the leaders of our two major political parties, all of whom profit from this system. They place themselves at the center of creation. They view human beings and the natural world as mere commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. Human suffering, wars, climate change, poverty, it is all the price of business. Nothing is sacred. The Lord of Profit is the Lord of Death. The Raskolnikovs of the world place unbridled and total faith in the human intellect. They disdain the attributes of compassion, empathy, beauty, justice and truth.

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Huffington’s Plunder
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 28 Feb 2011

The sale of The Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million, and the tidy profit of reportedly at least several million dollars made by principal owner and founder Arianna Huffington, who was already rich, is emblematic of this new paradigm of American journalism.

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Even Lost Wars Make Corporations Rich
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 17 Jan 2011

Power does not rest with the electorate. It does not reside with either of the two major political parties. It is not represented by the press. It is not arbitrated by a judiciary that protects us from predators. Power rests with corporations. And corporations gain very lucrative profits from war, even wars we have no chance of winning. All polite appeals to the formal systems of power will not end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must physically obstruct the war machine or accept a role as its accomplice.

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2011: A Brave New Dystopia
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 3 Jan 2011

The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.

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Happy as a Hangman
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 13 Dec 2010

What is frightening in collapsing societies is not only the killers, sadists, murderers and psychopaths who rise up out of the moral swamp to take power, but the huge numbers of ordinary people who become complicit in state crimes.

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Calling All Future-Eaters
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 26 Jul 2010

The human species during its brief time on Earth has exhibited a remarkable capacity to kill itself off. The Cro-Magnons dispatched the gentler Neanderthals. The conquistadors, with the help of smallpox, decimated the native populations in the Americas. Modern industrial warfare in the 20th century took at least 100 million lives, most of them civilians. And now we sit passive and dumb as corporations and the leaders of industrialized nations ensure that climate change will accelerate to levels that could mean the extinction of our species. Homo sapiens, as the biologist Tim Flannery points out, are the “future-eaters.”

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After Religion Fizzles, We’re Stuck with Nietzsche
Chris Hedges - Truthdig, 17 May 2010

We are rapidly losing the capacity for the moral life. We reject the anxiety of individual responsibility that laid the foundations for the open society. We are enjoined, after all, to love our neighbor, not our tribe. This empowerment of individual conscience was the starting point of the great ethical systems of all civilizations. Those who championed this radical individualism, from Confucius to Socrates to Jesus, fostered not obedience and conformity, but dissent and self-criticism. They initiated the separation of individual responsibility from the demands of the state.

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