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
When you have a liberal class that no longer functions, when those people who traditionally defend and care about a civil society no longer do so, then you cede power to very frightening, deformed figures, all of which we are watching leap up around the fringes of our political establishment - this lunatic fringe, which has largely taken over the Republican Party.
We live in imaginary, virtual worlds created by corporations that profit from our deception.
The arts often realize human truths well before other branches of human endeavor.
The inability to grasp the pathology* of our oligarchic rulers is one of our gravest faults.
There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege.
The few surviving Armenians no longer ask to go home. They do not ask for restitution. They ask simply to have the memory of their obliteration acknowledged. It is a moral obsession, the lonely legacy passed onto the third and fourth generation who no longer speak Armenian but who carry within them the seeds of resentment that will not be quashed.
The notion that the press was used in the [first Iraq] war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort.
If we remain fearful, then we will be further stripped of power as we barrel towards this neofeudalistic state where there is a world of masters and serfs, a kind of permanent underclass. That's what's happening; that's what's being created. Rapacious corporate business interests have shattered all kinds of regulations and controls. They have carried out a coup d'etat in slow motion. And it's over; they've won.
War is not about flag-waving and patriotism. War is about killing and death.
Rebellion is not going to go away...What has been unleashed, I think, can't be stopped...The importance of continuing acts of resistance is that it keeps this narrative alive...We speak a fundamental truth about this system that terrifies them.
No real journalist makes $5 million a year... Those in power fear and dislike real journalists.
What kind of a world are we going to leave the next generation? I, at least, want my children to look back and say, "My daddy was being arrested at the White House fence and booed off commencement stages. He was trying."
The purpose of bread and circuses is, as Neil Postman said in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, to distract, to divert emotional energy towards the absurd and the trivial and the spectacle while you are ruthlessly stripped of power.
The true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.