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Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges' original columns in Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009, and granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his Truthdig essay "One Day We'll All Be Terrorists."
Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey.
Hedges began his career reporting the war in El Salvador. Following six years in Latin America, he took time off to study Arabic and then went to Jerusalem and later Cairo. He spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the bureau chief there for The New York Times. He left the Middle East in 1995 for Sarajevo to cover the war in Bosnia and later reported the war in Kosovo. Afterward, he joined the Times' investigative team and was based in Paris to cover al-Qaida. He left the Times after being issued a formal reprimand for denouncing the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq.
He has written nine books, including "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle" (2009), "I Don't Believe in Atheists" (2008) and the best-selling "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" (2008). His book "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. His latest book is "Death of the Liberal Class" (2010)
Hedges holds a B.A. in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif. Hedges speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and knows ancient Greek and Latin. In addition to writing a weekly original column for Truthdig, he has written for Harper's Magazine, The New Statesman, The New York Review of Books, Adbusters, Granta, Foreign Affairs and other publications.
(7 comments) SHARE Monday, May 6, 2019 Creeping Toward Tyranny
Capitalists, throughout history, have backed fascism to thwart even the most tepid forms of socialism. All the pieces are in place. The hollowing out of our democratic institutions, which cannot be blamed on Trump, makes tyranny inevitable.
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, April 29, 2019 The Last Battle
The Cree have been under relentless assault since the arrival of the European colonialists in the 1500s. Now the 500 inhabitants of the Cree reserve, where many live in small, boxy prefabricated houses, are victims of a new iteration of colonial exploitation, one centered on the extraction of oil from the vast Alberta tar sands.
(14 comments) SHARE Monday, April 22, 2019 Our Ever-Deadlier Police State
Because of a failed court system, millions of young men and women are railroaded into prison, many for nonviolent offenses. SWAT teams with military weapons burst into homes often under warrants for nonviolent offenses, sometimes shooting those inside. Trigger-happy cops pump multiple rounds into the backs of unarmed men and women and are rarely charged with murder.
(13 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 17, 2019 First Julian Assange, Then Us
The arrest of Julian Assange eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities embraced by the Ecuadorian, British and U.S. governments, in the seizure of Assange, are ominous. They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes, carried out by the corporate states and the global ruling elite, will be masked from the public.
(23 comments) SHARE Monday, April 15, 2019 Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth
The more that human societies evolve, according to Hanson, the more they become "energy intensive" and ensure their own obliteration. This is why, many astronomers theorize, we have not encountered other advanced civilizations in the universe. They destroyed themselves.
(12 comments) SHARE Friday, April 12, 2019 The Martyrdom of Julian Assange
Under what law did Moreno authorize British police to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy -- diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory -- to arrest a naturalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did Prime Minister Theresa May order the British police to grab Assange, who has never committed a crime? Under what law did President Donald Trump demand the extradition of Assange, who is not a U.S. citizen?
(11 comments) SHARE Monday, April 8, 2019 Reckoning With Failure in the War on Terror
Those who oppose us are removed from the realm of the rational. They are seen as incomprehensible. Their hate has no justification. They are human embodiments of evil that must be eradicated. They hate us for our "values" or because they are driven by a perverted form of Islam.
(8 comments) SHARE Monday, April 1, 2019 Only the Struggle Matters
The brutality of our corporate executioners grows by the day. They will stop at nothing, including wholesale murder, to consolidate power and amass greater profits. Blinded by hubris, driven by greed, disdainful of democracy, foolishly believing their wealth will protect them, they will herd us over the cliff unless they are overthrown.
(15 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 26, 2019 Mueller Report Ends a Shameful Period for the Press
The empty chatter about Russia, including in The New York Times, exposes the bankruptcy of the U.S. media. MSNBC and CNN, which long ago abandoned journalism for entertainment, have breathlessly clogged the airwaves with ridiculous conspiracy theories and fantasies and used them to justify a faux crusade.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, March 25, 2019 Guns and Liberty
The proliferation of guns in American society is not only profitable for gun manufacturers, it fools the disempowered into fetishizing weapons as a guarantor of political agency. Guns buttress the myth of a rugged individualism that atomizes Americans, disdains organization and obliterates community, compounding powerlessness.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, March 18, 2019 Chelsea Manning and the New Inquisition
The prosecutions of government whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act, warrant-less wiretapping, monitoring of the communications of Americans and the persecution of Manning and Assange are parts of an interconnected process of preventing any of us from peering at the machinery of state. The resulting secrecy is vital for totalitarian systems.
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, March 11, 2019 Israel's Stranglehold on American Politics
srael's dominance of the Democratic Party is eroding. It is losing legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Israel's tactics, for this reason, will become more vicious and underhanded. Its interference in the democratic process will be characterized less by an attempt to persuade and more by the use of money to ensure fealty to its policies.
(11 comments) SHARE Monday, March 4, 2019 Giving the Bomb to Saudi Arabia's Dr. Strangelove
The drive to build nuclear reactors in Saudi Arabia is led by the half-wit son-in-law of the president, Jared Kushner, who met Tuesday with Salman in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, to discuss "ways to improve the condition of the entire region through economic investment," according to the White House.
(17 comments) SHARE Monday, February 25, 2019 Extinction Rebellion
The mass actions on April 15 might fizzle out. The crowds might not gather. The public might be apathetic. But if only a handful of us attempt to block a bridge or a road, even if we are swiftly swept away by the police, so swiftly there is not enough disruption to notice, it will be worth it.
(12 comments) SHARE Monday, February 18, 2019 Worshipping the Electronic Image
Donald Trump, like much of the American public, is entranced by electronic images. He interprets reality through the distortions of digital media. He is a product of cultural decay, not an aberration. The way he speaks, acts and thinks is the way many Americans speak, act and think. He will one day disappear, but the cultural degeneracy that produced him will remain.
(13 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 12, 2019 Peter Jackson's Cartoon War
When director-producer Peter Jackson's World War I film, "They Shall Not Grow Old," begins, he bombards us with the cliche's used to ennoble war.
It must have taken some effort after the war to find the tiny minority of veterans willing to utter this rubbish. Military life is a form of servitude, prolonged exposure to combat leaves you broken, scarred for life by trauma and often so numb ....
(33 comments) SHARE Monday, February 4, 2019 Goodbye to the Dollar
The inept and corrupt presidency of Donald Trump has unwittingly triggered the fatal blow to the American empire-the abandonment of the dollar as the world's principal reserve currency.
(55 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 30, 2019 The World to Come
The ruling elites are painfully aware that the foundations of American power are rotting. The outsourcing of manufacturing in the United States and the plunging of over half the population into poverty will, they know, not be reversed. The self-destructive government shutdown has been only one of numerous assaults on the efficiency of the administrative state.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, January 14, 2019 The "Private Governments" That Subjugate U.S. Workers
The ruling ideology of neoliberalism and libertarianism, used to justify the corporate domination and social inequality that afflict us, sells itself as the protector of freedom and liberty. It does this by subterfuge. It claims workers have the freedom to enter into employment contracts and terminate them, while ignoring the near-total suspension of rights during the period of employment.
(10 comments) SHARE Monday, January 7, 2019 The Election Circus Begins
Managed democracy has transformed elections from the simple, straightforward process of voting for a party platform or party positions to vast, choreographed theatrical productions. Politicians run on "moral" issues and use public relations experts to create manufactured personalities. Trump, his image constructed by a reality television show, proved more adept than his rivals at playing this game the last time around.