Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges Interview ~ The Template For Harvesting America, Sacrifice Zones And Blood

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OpEd News | October 27 2012 | Thanks, A.L.

This is part one of a two part transcript that’s over 5000 words.

Chris Hedges
Rob Kall

In this interview, Chris Hedges talks about the template being used to harvest America– at the expense of the middle class, the sacrifice zones feeling the most pain, and the blood price we’ve paid for the rights they are trying to take away.

Thanks to ON volunteer Don Caldarazzo    for help with the transcription process. 

Rob Kall:  And welcome to the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show (WNJC 1360 AM), sponsored byOpEdNews.com out of Washington Township, NJ, reaching metro Philly and South Jersey, and online of course on iTunes, look for Rob Kall, for this, and other ones.

Tonight my guest is one of my favorite, if not my favorite progressive author, Chris Hedges. He’s got a new book out that he co-authors with Joe Sacco: Days of Destruction-Days of Revolt. Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans.  He is part of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He writes a weekly original column, Truthdig. He was written for Harper’s Magazine, the New Statesman, and New York Review of Books.

Rob Kall: Welcome to the show Chris, again.

Chris Hedges: Thank you.

Image by Joe Sacco, from Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

Rob Kall: This is a wonderful book that you’ve written. It’s unusual, it’s different, because of the many kind of comic book illustrations by Joe Sacco – that really gets you thinking in seeing the pictures of the destruction that you’ve described in 80% of this book.  Most of this book is describing just how America has already fallen into third world status. It’s worse than third-world status, though, and I want you to talk about that, but I want to start with a quote from the book, which you put in the end under the chapter, “Days of Revolt.”  You say, “There are no excuses left: either you join the revolt, or you stand on the wrong side of History. You either obstruct through civil disobedience (the only way left to us) the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. You either taste, feel, and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt, or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. You are either a rebel or a slave.”

Let’s start with that. This is how you’re thinking lately?

Chris Hedges: Well, that comes at the end of the book, which is an attempt that both Joe and I made to describe a system that has been seized by political paralysis, and is dominated by [a] narrow corporate elite that no longer responds to the needs of citizens. It attempts to illustrate, by going into the poorest pockets of the country, that the formal mechanisms of power that once made incremental and peaceful reform no longer work, and that the only solution we have is civil disobedience. But that comes after detailing the conditions that people are living, in places like Camden, New Jersey, which per capita is the poorest city in the United States; Pine Ridge, South Dakota has the second poorest county in the country; The average life expectancy for a male on Pine Ridge is 48—that is the lowest in the western hemisphere, outside of Haiti; The coal fields of southern West Virginia; the produce fields where largely undocumented workers, without any kind of legal protection, organizing power or rights, pick the nation’s produce. And by the time you get there, I think, hopefully the reader has seen what happens when individuals in communities are forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace.  It’s a kind of absurdity, it’s a Utopian ideology, but it’s one that has gripped not only neo-Conservatives, but neo-Liberals, like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.

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The Maimed

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Truthdig | October 8 2012

Chris Hedges gave this talk Sunday night in New York City at a protest denouncing the 11th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. The event, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, was led by Veterans for Peace.

Many of us who are here carry within us death. The smell of decayed and bloated corpses. The cries of the wounded. The shrieks of children. The sound of gunfire. The deafening blasts. The fear. The stench of cordite. The humiliation that comes when you surrender to terror and beg for life. The loss of comrades and friends. And then the aftermath. The long alienation. The numbness. The nightmares. The lack of sleep. The inability to connect to all living things, even to those we love the most. The regret. The repugnant lies mouthed around us about honor and heroism and glory. The absurdity. The waste. The futility.

It is only the maimed that finally know war. And we are the maimed. We are the broken and the lame. We ask for forgiveness. We seek redemption. We carry on our backs this awful cross of death, for the essence of war is death, and the weight of it digs into our shoulders and eats away at our souls. We drag it through life, up hills and down hills, along the roads, into the most intimate recesses of our lives. It never leaves us. Those who know us best know that there is something unspeakable and evil many of us harbor within us. This evil is intimate. It is personal. We do not speak its name. It is the evil of things done and things left undone. It is the evil of war.

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Criminalizing Dissent

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Truthdig | RS_News | August 13 2012

Barack ObamaOPINION ~ I was on the 15th floor of the Southern U.S. District Court in New York in the courtroom of Judge Katherine Forrest last Tuesday. It was the final hearing in the lawsuit I brought in January against President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. I filed the suit, along with lawyers Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran, over Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). We were late joined by six co-plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg.

This section of the NDAA, signed into law by Obama on Dec. 31, 2011, obliterates some of our most important constitutional protections. It authorizes the executive branch to order the military to seize U.S. citizens deemed to be terrorists or associated with terrorists. Those taken into custody by the military, which becomes under the NDAA a domestic law enforcement agency, can be denied due process and habeas corpus and held indefinitely in military facilities. Any activist or dissident, whose rights were once protected under the First Amendment, can be threatened under this law with indefinite incarceration in military prisons, including our offshore penal colonies. The very name of the law itself – the Homeland Battlefield Bill – suggests the totalitarian credo of endless war waged against enemies within “the homeland” as well as those abroad.

“The essential thrust of the NDAA is to create a system of justice that violates the separation of powers,” Mayer told the court. “[The Obama administration has] taken detention out of the judicial branch and put it under the executive branch.”

In May, Judge Forrest issued a temporary injunction invalidating Section 1021 as a violation of the First and Fifth amendments. It was a courageous decision. Forrest will decide within a couple of weeks whether she will make the injunction permanent.

In last week’s proceeding, the judge, who appeared from her sharp questioning of government attorneys likely to nullify the section, cited the forced internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II as a precedent she did not want to follow. Forrest read to the courtroom a dissenting opinion by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in Korematsu v. United States, a ruling that authorized the detention during the war of some 110,00 Japanese-Americans in government “relocation camps.”

“[E]ven if they were permissible military procedures, I deny that it follows that they are constitutional,” Jackson wrote in his 1944 dissent. “If, as the Court holds, it does follow, then we may as well say that any military order will be constitutional, and have done with it.”

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Peter Z. Scheer ~ And Now A Word From The Founders

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Truthdig | July 4 2012 | Thanks, Ann

Happy Birthday, America. Here’s a reminder of your more radical youth.

Chris HedgesLet’s begin with the Declaration of Independence and the long-haired revolutionary who penned it, Thomas Jefferson.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. [link]

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Truthdigger of the Week ~ Chris Hedges

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Truthdig | January 20 2012

Late last year, President Obama pulled a fast one by changing his stance on the National Defense Authorization Act so suddenly and drastically that Americans were left with a bad case of legislative whiplash—and a very serious state of affairs with regard to our civil liberties. Obama’s stunning switch underscored how abuses of power on the government’s part must be called out through uncompromising counter-statements from the people and the press. That’s why the choice was eminently clear to make Truthdig columnist, author and activist Chris Hedges our pick for this installment of Truthdigger of the Week.

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