The US is a de facto one-party state where the ideology of national security is sacrosanct, unsustainable debt props up the empire, and the primary business is war. When all else fails, when you are clueless about how to halt a 7.5% inflation rate, when your Build Back Better bill …
Read More »Chris Hedges: The execution of Julian Assange
Let us name Julian Assange’s executioners. Joe Biden. Boris Johnson. Scott Morrison. Theresa May. Lenin Moreno. Donald Trump. Barack Obama. Mike Pompeo. Hillary Clinton. Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett and Lord Justice Timothy Victor Holroyde. Crown Prosecutors James Lewis QC, Clair Dobbin QC and Joel Smith. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser. Assistant …
Read More »Chris Hedges: The Assange case is the most important battle for press freedom in our time
For the past two days, I have been watching the extradition hearing for Julian Assange via video link from London. The United States is appealing a lower court ruling that denied the US request to extradite Assange not, unfortunately, because in the eyes of the court he is innocent of …
Read More »Chris Hedges: America’s fate is oligarchy or autocracy
The competing systems of power in the United States are divided between oligarchy and autocracy. There are no other alternatives. Neither are pleasant. Each has peculiar and distasteful characteristics. Each pays lip service to the fictions of democracy and constitutional rights. And each exacerbates the widening social and political divide …
Read More »Chris Hedges: We Americans kill with an inchoate fury. The evil we do is the evil we get
I was in Times Square in New York City shortly after the second plane banked and plowed into the South Tower. The crowd looking up at the Jumbotron gasped in dismay at the billowing black smoke and the fireball that erupted from the tower. There was no question now that …
Read More »Chris Hedges: The revengeful suffering orchestrated by the American empire on Afghans will be of Biblical proportions
The Carthaginian general Hannibal, who came close to defeating the Roman Republic in the Second Punic War, committed suicide in 181 BC in exile as Roman soldiers closed in on his residence in the Bithynian village of Libyssa, now modern-day Turkey. It had been more than thirty years since he …
Read More »Chris Hedges: The price of conscience
Daniel Hale, a former intelligence analyst in the drone program for the Air Force who as a private contractor in 2013 leaked some 17 classified documents about drone strikes to the press, was just sentenced to 45 months in prison. The documents, published by The Intercept on October 15, 2015, …
Read More »Chris Hedges: Bless our American traitors
Daniel Hale, an active-duty Air Force intelligence analyst, stood in the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park in October 2011 in his military uniform. He held up a sign that read “Free Bradley Manning,” who had not yet announced her transition. It was a singular act of conscience few in uniform …
Read More »Chris Hedges: Bandaging the corpse
This article was originally published by ScheerPost. The established ruling elites know there is a crisis. They agreed, at least temporarily, to throw money at it with the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 bill known as the American Rescue Plan (ARP). But the ARP will not alter the structural inequities, either by raising …
Read More »Chris Hedges: Cancel culture, where liberalism goes to die
This article was originally published by ScheerPost. The Rev. Will Campbell was forced out of his position as director of religious life at the University of Mississippi in 1956 because of his calls for integration. He escorted black children through a hostile mob in 1957 to integrate Little Rock’s Central …
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