Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges            (journalist, activist, historian, author)
Born	Christopher Lynn Hedges 1956-09-18 St. Johnsbury, Vermont, USA
Nationality	American
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	Colgate University, Harvard Divinity School
Spouse	Eunice Wong
Interests	• war • peace • corporate media • history
A fearless speaker of truth to power, Chris Hedges was a war correspondent for almost 20 years, when he quit and began a blistering series of books which challenge different aspects of corporate capitalism. In 2012 he filed suit contending that the NDAA's provision for indefinite detention without trial was unconstitutional. Unbowed, he remains a thorn in the side of the establishment.

Christopher Lynn Hedges is a ex-war correspondent who having finally had enough of war, returned to the United States and found the class conflict increasingly breaking out. He is a compassionate, educated and eloquent advocate of non-violent civil disobedience. Notwithstanding his failure to address the use of false flag attacks in the 21^st century, he is a widely respected speaker against the growth of the global fascist Police State, and made a legal challenge to the 2012 NDAA.

“The crisis that we face is not so much an economic crisis but a moral crisis. The utter cynicism on the part of very well paid media who have become in essence hedonists of power (which is what courtiers are) that the truth no longer matters, that that sacred contract that a great reporter makes between the viewer or the reader to tell them the truth is no longer relevant.”
Chris Hedges

Background

Hedges' father was a progressive Christian minister who fought for the rights of homosexuals. He graduated from Harvard Divinity School but became disillusioned with institutionalized religion as practiced in USA and became a war correspondent in 1983.

Career

Hedges reported on wars and "terrorism" for almost 20 years until he snapped, and realized he was no longer going to write about particular wars within the strict confines of his editor's brief, but freelance, about the entire phenomenon of war. He has since written almost a book a year, including the best selling War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning in 2002. His books tend to revolve around the ongoing social and economic struggles in US society and the need for consciousness of and resistance to the increasingly tyrannical plutocracy.

NDAA Lawsuit

Full article: Hedges v. Obama

Hedges v. Obama is a lawsuit filed January 13, 2012 against the Obama Administration and members of the U.S. Congress by a group including Christopher Hedges. They challenged the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 which legalizes the U.S. government's to indefinite detention of people who are part of or "substantially support" Al Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces engaged in hostilities against the United States. On 28th April, 2014, the US Supreme Court let an earlier appeals court verdict stand, implying that there was nothing unconstitutional in indefinite detention without trial.

Plagiarism allegation

In 2014, Chris Hedges was accused of plagiarism in what Op Ed News termed "huge hit piece" that made a big deal of his "sloppy sourcing". As of December, 2016, the articles was #10 on Google when searching on "Chris Hedges".

Activities

Chris Hedges avoids almost all socializing, preferring to read. He regularly reads a number of commercially-controlled media sources, including New York Times, The London Review of Books.

Publications

As a catharsis, Chris Hedges published War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning.

 

Legal Case

Name	Plaintiff(s)	Defendant(s)	Start	End	Description
Hedges v. Obama	Daniel Ellsberg Chris Hedges Noam Chomsky Jenifer Bolen Kai Wargalla Birgitta Jónsdóttir Alexa O'Brien	Barack Obama Leon Panetta John McCain John Boehner Harry Reid Eric Cantor Nancy Pelosi US Department of Defense Mitch McConnell United States of America	13 January 2012	28 April 2014	The plaintiffs challenged the 2012 NDAA contending that indefinite detention on "suspicion of providing substantial support" to groups such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban was so vague as to allow unconstitutional, indefinite detention of civilians based on vague allegations. The Court of Appeals struck down an initial agreement, and the US Supreme Court concurred, arguing that the plaintiffs could not prove they would be affected by the law, so had no standing to contest it.

 

A Document by Chris Hedges

Title	Document type	Publication date	Subject(s)
Document:The tears of Gaza must be our tears	speech	5 August 2010	Gaza

 

Quotes by Chris Hedges

Page	Quote	Date	Source
"Post-truth"	“Reality is under assault. Verbal confusion reigns. Truth and illusion have merged. Mental chaos makes it hard to fathom what is happening. We feel trapped in a hall of mirrors. Exposed lies are answered with other lies. The rational is countered with the irrational. Cognitive dissonance prevails. We endure a disquieting shame and even guilt. Tens of millions of Americans, especially women, undocumented workers, Muslims and African-Americans, suffer the acute anxiety of being pursued by a predator. All this is by design. Demagogues always infect the governed with their own psychosis.”	30 January 2017
9-11/Official narrative	“It turns out, 45 years later, that those who truly hate us for our freedoms are not the array of dehumanised enemies cooked up by the war machine — the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, even the Taliban, Al-Qaeda or ISIS. They are the financiers, bankers, politicians, public intellectuals and pundits, lawyers, journalists and business people, cultivated in the elite universities and business schools who sold us the Utopian dream of neoliberalism. We are entering the twilight phase of capitalism. Capitalists unable to generate profits by expanding markets have, as Karl Marx predicted, begun to cannibalise the state like ravenous parasites.”	2017	Unwelcome Guests
Ancient Rome/Deep state	“Commodus, like a number of other late Roman emperors and like Donald Trump was incompetent and consumed by his own vanity. He commissioned innumerable statues of himself as Hercules and had little interest in governance. He used his position as head of state to make himself the star of his own ongoing public show. He fought, victoriously, as a gladiator in the arena in fixed bouts. Power for Commodus, as it is for Trump, was primarily about catering to his bottomless narcissism, hedonism and lust for wealth. He sold public offices to the ancient equivalents of Betsy DeVos and Steve Mnuchin. He orchestrated a vast kleptocracy.”	2017	Unwelcome Guests
New York Times	“The truth is hard to find. The truth is hard to know. The truth is more important than ever,” reads a television ad for The New York Times. What the paper fails to add is that the hardest place to find the truth about the forces affecting the life of the average American and the truth about empire is in the Times itself. News organizations, from the [NYT] to the tawdry forms of entertainment masquerading as news on television, have rendered most people and their concerns invisible.”
Donald Trump	“Trump is the face of our collective idiocy. He is what lies behind the mask of our professed civility and rationality, a sputtering, narcissistic, bloodthirsty megalomaniac.”	June 2017	YouTube

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