Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges
Christopher Lynn "Chris" Hedgesis an American journalist, activist, author, and Presbyterian minister. Hedges is also known as the best-selling author of several books including War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning—a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction—Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Death of the Liberal Class, the New York Times best seller, written with cartoonist Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, and his most recent Wages...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth18 September 1956
CountryUnited States of America
Very few veterans can return to the battlefield and summon the moral courage to confront what they did as armed combatants. Wallowing in their pain and at times in self-pity, they are often incapable of facing the human suffering and death they inflicted, especially on the defenseless and the weak. They have a habit of disregarding, as they did during the war, the people who live in the lands they brutalized. Walking among the very human beings who bear the scars of war, they see only their own ghosts.
It wasn't a direct route. I began as a freelance reporter. That's an important distinction, because people who rise through the ranks of The New York Times become vetted, conditioned, harassed, and shaped by the institution. That never happened to me.
It's the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings… And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from creating essentially a corporate oligarchic state.
There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege.
If we don't hold fast to our moral principles, nobody's going to. We don't have to have a majority, but once ten, fifteen, twenty million people start voting left, we'll scare the piss out of the Democrats, and they'll have to respond. But they're not going to respond to us until that happens.
We on the left have forgotten that the question is not how do you get good people to rule, most people who rule are mediocre at best and usually venal. The question is how do we make those in power frightened of us and not be seduced by formal political processes.
I remember this kid said, 'I can't believe we did all this work to come in second,' ... I wanted to kill him because we learned so much along the way.
the perfect chair to sit in or porridge to taste.
point us away from the city of man toward the city of God.
War is necrophilia. And this necrophilia is central to soldiering, just as it is central to the makeup of suicide bombers and terrorists. The necrophilia is hidden under platitudes about duty or comradeship.
I like new challenges -- I'm following someone strong, ... I'm hoping this will be the place to stay.
I'm trying to give them a focus ... that you have to do it for yourself, but you also have to do well for each other, ... We need to represent the school and the community.
I'm not saying we're going to win. I am saying rebellion becomes a way to protect your own dignity. Corporations are, theologically speaking, institutions of death. They commodify everything - the natural world, human beings - that they exploit until exhaustion or collapse. They know no limits.
The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism