Articles by Chris Hedges
We found 230 results.
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.
→ read full articleThe 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.
→ read full articleMumia 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.”
→ read full articleThe War in the Shadows
Chris Hedges – Truthdig,
27 Aug 2012
… It exposed the cynicism of undercover operatives on all sides, men and women who lie and deceive for a living, who betray relationships, including between each other, who steal and who carry out murder. One knows them immediately. Their ideological allegiances do not matter. They have the faraway eyes of the disconnected, along with nebulous histories and suspicious and vague associations. They can be personable, even charming, but they are also invariably vain, dishonest and sinister. They cannot be trusted. It does not matter what side they are on.
→ read full articleThe 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?
→ read full articleThe 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.
→ read full articleNorthern 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.
→ read full articleThe War on Gays
Chris Hedges – Truthdig,
28 May 2012
The sentencing of Dharun Ravi for the hateful abuse that may have driven his gay roommate at Rutgers, Tyler Clementi, to commit suicide, or Barack Obama’s public acceptance of gay marriage, prevents many of us from seeing that life for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people is getting worse—much worse.
→ read full articleThe Best among Us
Chris Hedges - Trughdig,
3 Oct 2011
There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil.
→ read full articleThis 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.
→ read full articleThrow 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.
→ read full articleHuffington’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.
→ read full articleEven 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.
→ read full article2011: 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.
→ read full articleHappy 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.
→ read full article
America: The Silence of a Nation
Chris Hedges - TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Nov 2010
The author spoke at the Revolution Books Town Hall Meeting at Ethical Culture Society on January 13, 2009 condemning Israel and USA complicity in Israel’s murderous destruction and genocide of the innocent men, women and children of GAZA and the West Bank.
→ read full articleCalling 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.”
→ read full articleAfter 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.
→ read full articleTHE TERROR-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
Chris Hedges – Global Research,
10 Feb 2010
The conviction of the Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui in New York last week of trying to kill American military officers and FBI agents illustrates that the greatest danger to our security comes not from al-Qaida but the thousands of shadowy mercenaries, kidnappers, killers and torturers our government employs around the globe. The bizarre story surrounding Siddiqui, […]
→ read full articleTHE CREED OF OBJECTIVITY KILLED THE NEWS
Chris Hedges – Truthdig,
5 Feb 2010
The symbiotic relationship between the press and the power elite worked for nearly a century. It worked as long as our power elite, no matter how ruthless or insensitive, was competent. But once our power elite became incompetent and morally bankrupt, the press, along with the power elite, lost its final vestige of credibility. The […]
→ read full articleONE DAY WE’LL ALL BE TERRORISTS
Chris Hedges, Truthdig,
2 Jan 2010
Our descent is the familiar disease of decaying empires. Dissent is starting to become defined as an act of terrorism.Syed Fahad Hashmi can tell you about the dark heart of America. He knows that our First Amendment rights have become a joke, that habeas corpus no longer exists and that we torture, not only in […]
→ read full articleCELEBRATING SLAUGHTER: WAR AND COLLECTIVE AMNESIA
Chris Hedges,
6 Oct 2009
War memorials and museums are temples to the god of war. The hushed voices, the well-tended grass, the flapping of the flags allow us to ignore how and why our young died. They hide the futility and waste of war. They sanitize the savage instruments of death that turn young soldiers and Marines into killers, […]
→ read full articleTHE WAR ON LANGUAGE
Chris Hedges,
3 Oct 2009
There is a scene in “Othello” when the Moor is so consumed by jealousy and rage that he loses the eloquence and poetry that make him the most articulate man in Venice. He turns to the audience, shortly before he murders Desdemona, and sputters, “Goats and monkeys!” Othello fell prey to wild self-delusion and unchecked […]
→ read full articleWITH GLOBAL CAPITALISM EXPOSED AS A SHAM, ALL THE GLOBAL ELITE HAVE IS PURE FORCE
Chris Hedges,
22 Sep 2009
Delegates from the world’s wealthiest nations gather this week for G-20, walled off from protesters by a National Guard combat battalion recently returned from Iraq.The rage of the disposed is fracturing the country, dividing it into camps that are unmoored from the political mainstream. Movements are building on the ends of the political spectrum that […]
→ read full articleIRAN HAD A DEMOCRACY BEFORE WE TOOK IT AWAY
Chris Hedges,
22 Jun 2009
Iranians do not need or want us to teach them about liberty and representative government. They have long embodied this struggle. It is we who need to be taught. It was Washington that orchestrated the 1953 coup to topple Iran’s democratically elected government, the first in the Middle East, and install the compliant shah in […]
→ read full articleTHE DISEASE OF PERMANENT WAR
Chris Hedges,
19 May 2009
The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open society, become […]
→ read full articleWHO ARE THE REAL PSYCHOPATHS IN AFGHANISTAN?
Chris Hedges,
13 May 2009
The U.S. has killed twice as many Afghan civilians as the Taliban this year and that number is sure to rise. The bodies of dozens, perhaps well over a hundred, women, children and men, their corpses blown into bits of human flesh by iron fragmentation bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes in a village in the […]
→ read full articleMAN IS A CRUEL ANIMAL
Chris Hedges,
23 Dec 2008
It was Joseph Conrad I thought of when I read an article in The Nation magazine this month about white vigilante groups that rose up out of the chaos of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans to terrorize and murder blacks. It was Conrad I thought of when I saw the ominous statements by authorities, […]
→ read full articleCONFRONTING THE TERRORIST WITHIN
Chris Hedges,
2 Dec 2008
The Hindu-Muslim communal violence that led to the attacks in Mumbai, as well as the warnings that the New York City transit system may have been targeted by al-Qaida, are one form of terrorism. There are other forms. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when viewed from the receiving end, are state-sponsored acts of terrorism. […]
→ read full articleAMERICA’S WARS OF SELF-DESTRUCTION
Chris Hedges,
17 Nov 2008
War is a poison. It is a poison that nations and groups must at times ingest to ensure their survival. But, like any poison, it can kill you just as surely as the disease it is meant to eradicate. The poison of war courses unchecked through the body politic of the United States. We […]
→ read full article