Articles by Chris Hedges | Films For Action

Saving the Planet Means Overthrowing the Ruling Elites

Chris Hedges · We must organize to replace existing structures of power with ones capable of coping with the crisis before us.

Our Invisible Government

Chris Hedges · The most powerful and important organs in the invisible government are the nation’s bloated and unaccountable intelligence agencies.

The Coming Show Trial of Julian Assange

Chris Hedges · LONDON—On Friday morning I was in a small courtroom at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London. Julian Assange, held in Belmarsh Prison and dressed in a pale-blue prison shirt, appeared on a video screen directly in front of me...

America's Reproductive Slaves

Chris Hedges · On Wednesday, the day it was announced that the U.S. birthrate fell for the fourth straight year, signaling the lowest number of births in 32 years, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law the most draconian anti-abortion law in the...

Creeping Toward Tyranny

Chris Hedges · Capitalists, throughout history, have backed fascism to thwart even the most tepid forms of socialism

Confronting the Culture of Death

Chris Hedges · The issue before us is death. Not only our individual death, which is more imminent for some of us this morning than others, but our collective death. We have begun the sixth great mass extinction, driven by our 150-year binge on...

Neoliberalism's Dark Path to Fascism

Chris Hedges · Neoliberalism transforms freedom for the many into freedom for the few. Its logical result is neofascism.

Crucifying Julian Assange

Chris Hedges · What is happening to Assange should terrify the press. And yet his plight is met with indifference and sneering contempt.

The Cult of Trump

Chris Hedges · Cult leaders arise from decayed communities and societies in which people have been shorn of political, social and economic power. The disempowered, infantilized by a world they cannot control, gravitate to cult leaders who appear...

The Coming Collapse

Chris Hedges · It is impossible for any doomed population to grasp how fragile the decayed financial, social and political system is on the eve of implosion.

The Cult of Violence Always Kills the Left

Chris Hedges · The Weather Underground, a clandestine revolutionary organization that advocated violence, was seen by my father and other clergy members who were involved in Vietnam anti-war protests as one of the most self-destructive forces on the...

The Oligarchs’ ‘Guaranteed Basic Income’ Scam

Chris Hedges · Beware the architects of our neofeudalism calling on the government to pay a guaranteed basic income

The Useful Idiocy of Donald Trump

Chris Hedges · The problem with Donald Trump is not that he is imbecilic and inept—it is that he has surrendered total power to the oligarchic and military elites. They get what they want. They do what they want. Although the president is a one-man...

Thought Police for the 21st Century: Google, Facebook Suppress Left Media Under the Guise of Combating "Fake News"

Chris Hedges · DETROIT—The abolition of net neutrality and the use of algorithms by Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter to divert readers and viewers from progressive, left-wing and anti-war sites, along with demonizing as foreign agents the journ

The End of Empire

Chris Hedges · The death spiral appears unstoppable, meaning the U.S. as we know it will no longer exist within a decade or, at most, two.

The Silencing of Dissent

Chris Hedges · Now that the ideology of global capitalism has been discredited, the ruling elites are turning to blacklists, internet censorship and charges of “fake news” to shut down their critics.

The Great Flood

Chris Hedges · How many times will we rebuild Florida’s cities, Houston, coastal New Jersey, New Orleans and other population centers ravaged by storms lethally intensified by global warming? At what point, surveying the devastation and knowing more...

How ‘Antifa’ Mirrors the ‘Alt-Right’

Chris Hedges · Behind the rhetoric of the “alt-right” about white nativism and protecting American traditions, history and Christian values is the lust for violence. Behind the rhetoric of antifa, the Black Bloc and the so-called “

Trump Is the Symptom, Not the Disease

Chris Hedges · The persecution of Mumia Abu-Jamal, MOVE members and all the radicals of four decades ago is not ancient history. It is the genesis of the present.

The Reign of Idiots

Chris Hedges · Donald Trump. King of the horrifingly dumb and dangerously greedy.

Chris Hedges: The Pandora's Box of War

Chris Hedges · War opens a Pandora’s box of evils that once unleashed are beyond anyone’s control. The invasion of Afghanistan set out to defeat al-Qaida, and nearly 16 years later, we are embroiled in a losing fight with the Taliban. We believed we...

A Last Chance for Resistance

Chris Hedges · The crawl toward despotism within a failed democracy is always incremental. No regime planning to utterly extinguish civil liberties advertises its intentions in advance. It pays lip service to liberty and justice while obliterating the...

Make America Ungovernable

Chris Hedges · Donald Trump’s regime is rapidly reconfiguring the United States into an authoritarian state. All forms of dissent will soon be criminalized. Civil liberties will no longer exist. Corporate exploitation, through the abolition of...

We Can't Battle the Bigotry Stoked by Trump without a Strategy to Alleviate the Chronic Misery Behind It

Chris Hedges · My relatives in Maine are deplorables. I cannot write on their behalf. I can write in their defense. They live in towns and villages that have been ravaged by deindustrialization. The bank in Mechanic Falls, where my grandparents...

The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism

Chris Hedges · College-educated elites, on behalf of corporations, carried out the savage neoliberal assault on the working poor. Now they are being made to pay. Their duplicity—embodied in politicians such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack...

Post-Brexit, The Far Right Could Easily Ascend to Power, But There's One Way We Can Prevent That

Chris Hedges · Great Britain’s decision to leave the European Union has wiped out many bankers and global speculators. They will turn, as they did in 2008, to governments to rescue them from default. Most governments, including ours, will probably...

Con Vs. Con

Chris Hedges · During the presidential election cycle, liberals display their gutlessness. Liberal organizations, such as MoveOn.org, become cloyingly subservient to the Democratic Party. Liberal media, epitomized by MSNBC, ruthlessly purge those who...

Reform or Revolution

Chris Hedges · Chris Hedges on revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg in the context of the upcoming US election.

Welcome to 1984

Chris Hedges · The façade of democracy and the disempowerment of the citizenry by corporations has sparked a nationwide revolt. Elites, fearing unrest, will soon become ruthless. We must engage now in acts of sustained civic mobilization and civil...

The Lie of Patriotism

Chris Hedges · When Rory Fanning, a burly veteran who served in the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion and was deployed in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2004, appeared at the Donald Trump rally in Chicago last month he was wearing the top half of his combat...

The Illusion of Freedom - Why Corporate Systems of Power Must Be Destroyed

Chris Hedges · The seizure of political and economic power by corporations is unassailable. Who funds and manages our elections? Who writes our legislation and laws? Who determines our defense policies and vast military expenditures? Who is in charge...

The Creeping Villainy of American Politics

Chris Hedges · The threefold rise in hate crimes against Muslims since the Paris and San Bernardino attacks and the acceptance of hate speech as a legitimate form of political discourse signal the morbidity of our civil society. The body politic is...

Apocalyptic Capitalism

Chris Hedges · The charade of the 21st United Nations climate summit will end, as past climate summits have ended, with lofty rhetoric and ineffectual cosmetic reforms. Since the first summit more than 20 years ago, carbon dioxide emissions have...

The Age of the Demagogues

Chris Hedges · Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at FreedomFest on July 11 in Las Vegas. (John Locher / AP

States of Terror

Chris Hedges · It is nearly certain that we will endure, sooner rather than later, another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil. The blundering of our military into the Middle East; the failed states that have risen out of the...

Where Is Our Jeremy Corbyn?

Chris Hedges · The politics of Jeremy Corbyn, elected by a landslide Saturday to lead Britain’s Labour Party after its defeat at the polls last May, are part of the global revolt against corporate tyranny. He had spent his long career as a pariah...

Noam Chomsky Has 'Never Seen Anything Like This'

Chris Hedges · Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate. Chomsky has done this despite...

The Great Unraveling: In Times of National Crisis and Public Outrage, Strange and Dangerous Candidates Often Arise

Chris Hedges · The ideological and physical hold of American imperial power, buttressed by the utopian ideology of neoliberalism and global capitalism, is unraveling. Most, including many of those at the heart of the American empire, recognize that...

We Are All Greeks Now

Chris Hedges · The poor and the working class in the United States know what it is to be Greek. They know underemployment and unemployment. They know life without a pension. They know existence on a few dollars a day. They know gas and electricity...

Corporate Capitalism Is the Foundation of Police Brutality and the Prison State

Chris Hedges · Our national conversation on race and crime is based on a fiction. It is the fiction that the organs of internal security, especially the judiciary and the police, can be adjusted, modernized or professionalized to make possible a...

The Electoral Farce

Chris Hedges · I intend to devote no more time to the upcoming presidential elections than walking to my local polling station on Election Day, voting for a third-party candidate, most likely the Green Party candidate, and going home. Any further...

"We Are In a Revolutionary Moment": Chris Hedges Explains Why An Uprising Is Coming, And Soon

Chris Hedges · The status quo is doomed but whether the future will be progressive or reactionary is uncertain, Hedges tells Salon

Marx Was Right

Chris Hedges · Karl Marx exposed the peculiar dynamics of capitalism, or what he called “the bourgeois mode of production.” He foresaw that capitalism had built within it the seeds of its own destruction. He knew that reigning ideologies—think...

Make the Rich Panic

Chris Hedges · It does not matter to the corporate rich who wins the presidential election. It does not matter who is elected to Congress. The rich have the power. They throw money at their favorites the way a gambler puts cash on his favorite...

Choosing Life

Chris Hedges · MINISINK, N.Y.—The affable, soft-spoken dairy farmer stood outside his 70-stall milking barn on his 230-acre family farm. When his father started farming there in 1950 were about 800 dairy farms in New York state’s Orange County. Only...

The Time Is Right for a Palace Revolution

Chris Hedges · PRINCETON, N.J.—Tariq Ali is part of the royalty of the left. His more than 20 books on politics and history, his seven novels, his screenplays and plays and his journalism in the Black Dwarf newspaper, the New Left Review and other...

The Terror We Give Is the Terror We Get

Chris Hedges · We fire missiles from the sky that incinerate families huddled in their houses. They incinerate a pilot cowering in a cage. We torture hostages in our black sites and choke them to death by stuffing rags down their throats. They...

How America's Sporting Events Have Turned into Mass Religious Events to Bless Wars and Militarism

Chris Hedges · BOSTON, Jul 7, 2014 —On Saturday I went to one of the massive temples across the country where we celebrate our state religion. The temple I visited was Boston’s Fenway Park. I was inspired to go by reading

Killing Ragheads for Jesus: On Watching 'American Sniper'

Chris Hedges · “American Sniper” lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. society—the gun culture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have an innate right as a “Christian” nation to exterminate the “lesser breeds” of the...

Chris Hedges: A Message From the Dispossessed

Chris Hedges · The terrorist attack in France that took place at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo was not about free speech. It was not about radical Islam. It did not illustrate the fictitious clash of civilizations. It was a harbinger of an...

The Coming Climate Revolt: Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges · Chris Hedges made these remarks Saturday at a panel discussion in New York City titled “The Climate Crisis: Which Way Out?” The other panelists were Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, Kshama Sawant and Sen. Bernie Sande

Sacrificing the Vulnerable, From Gaza to America

Chris Hedges · Chris Hedges gave this speech Saturday at the Sauk County Fairgrounds in Baraboo, Wis., before a crowd of about 2,000. His address followed one there by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who seems to be preparing to run...

How the Brutalized Become Brutal

Chris Hedges · The horrific pictures of the beheading of American reporter James Foley, the images of executions of alleged collaborators in Gaza and the bullet-ridden bodies left behind in Iraq by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant are the...

Chris Hedges: Why Israel Lies

Chris Hedges · All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, including Israel and Hamas. But Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic and totalitarian regimes. It does not deform the truth; it inverts it. It...

The Palestinians' Right to Self-Defense

Chris Hedges · If Israel insists, as the Bosnian Serbs did in Sarajevo, on using the weapons of industrial warfare against a helpless civilian population then that population has an inherent right to self-defense under Article 51 of the United...

Israel Is Captive to Its 'Destructive Process'

Chris Hedges · Raul Hilberg in his monumental work “The Destruction of the European Jews” chronicled a process of repression that at first was “relatively mild” but led, step by step, to the Holocaust. It started with legal discrimination and ended...

The Trouble With Chris Christie: Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges · The Trouble With Chris Christie http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_trouble_with_chris_christie_20140112/ Posted on Jan 13, 2014 By Chris Hedges New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has been Wall Street’

Our Invisible Revolution

Chris Hedges · “Did you ever ask yourself how it happens that government and capitalism continue to exist in spite of all the evil and trouble they are causing in the world?” the anarchist

Let's Get This Class War Started

Chris Hedges · “The rich are different from us,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked to Ernest Hemingway, to which Hemingway allegedly replied, “Yes, they have more money.” The exchange, although it never actually took place, sums up a...

What's Happening in Egypt is a Precursor to a Global War Between the World's Elites and the Poor

Chris Hedges · Radical Islam is the last refuge of the Muslim poor. The mandated five prayers a day give the only real structure to the lives of impoverished believers. The careful rituals of washing before prayers in the mosque, the strict moral...

The Persecution of Lynne Stewart - A Casualty of The War on Terror Witch Hunt

Chris Hedges · Lynne Stewart, in the vindictive and hysterical world of the war on terror, is one of its martyrs. A 73-year-old lawyer who spent her life defending the poor, the marginalized and the despised, including blind cleric Sheik Omar Abdel...

The Disease of Objectivity Is Killing The News

Chris Hedges · Reporters who witness the worst of human suffering and return to newsrooms angry see their compassion washed out or severely muted by the layers of editors who stand between the reporter and the reader. The creed of objectivity and...

Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All

Chris Hedges · Gaza is a window on our coming dystopia. The growing divide between the world’s elite and its miserable masses of humanity is maintained through spiraling violence. Many impoverished regions of the world, which have fallen off the...

The Perversion of Scholarship

Chris Hedges · Fraternities, sororities and football, along with other outsized athletic programs, have decimated most major American universities. Scholarship, inquiry, self-criticism, moral autonomy and a search for artistic and esoteric forms of...

Occupy Draws Strength From the Powerless

Chris Hedges · There is a recipe for breaking popular movements. I watched it play out over five years in the war in El Salvador. I now see these familiar patterns in the assault against the Occupy movement. It goes like this. Physically eradicate the...

Why I’m Suing Barack Obama

Chris Hedges · Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on my behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of...

This Is What Revolution Looks Like

Chris Hedges · Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they...

A Movement Too Big to Fail

Chris Hedges · There is no danger that the protesters who have occupied squares, parks and plazas across the nation in defiance of the corporate state will be co-opted by the Democratic Party or groups like MoveOn. The faux liberal reformers, whose...

Panache! Why We Must Fight

Chris Hedges · My three-year-old son’s favorite book is Out of the Blue. It has large color photographs of sea animals, from plankton to clownfish to orcas. I often find my son, dressed in his pajamas, on the floor of his bedroom in the morning...

The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic

Chris Hedges · The moral philosopher Cornel West, if Barack Obama’s ascent to power was a morality play, would be the voice of conscience. Rahm Emanuel, a cynical product of the Chicago political machine, would be Satan. Emanuel in the first scene of...

Huffington’s Plunder

Chris Hedges · I was in New York City on Thursday night at the Brecht Forum to discuss with the photographer Eugene Richards his powerful new book “War Is Personal” when I was approached for an interview by a blogger for The Huffington Post. I had...