Articles by Chris Hedge
We found 318 results.
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.
→ 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.
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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 […]
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