Articles by Chris Hedges
MEXICO CITY — There are two ways to confront global capitalism. There are mass movements, especially strikes, which disrupt commerce and government to force the ruling class to create...
The war on Iran has not only ended in a humiliating defeat for the United States, but resulted in a dramatic shift in the balance of power in the Middle East and the Global South.
Trump’s catastrophic miscalculation in Iran and refusal to accept the inevitability of defeat is pushing us towards a global depression and ensuring the suffering and immiseration of...
America’s suicidal march began long before Donald Trump. Trump and the buffoons around him are the inevitable final chapter of the decaying empire.
Trump’s portrayal of himself as Jesus, or anointed by Jesus, is typical of cult leaders.
Trump is dangerous not simply because of his imbecility and unbridled narcissism, but because he lacks the core attributes of empathy and understanding that define the human soul.
Gaza is only the start. The new world order is one where the weak are obliterated by the strong, the rule of law does not exist, genocide is an instrument of control and barbarism is...
Once again, America is going to war for Israel. Once again, many will die for the Zionist state, including American service members. Once again, we will stumble blindly into a military...
The mounting social inequality is fueling protests around the globe. The global ruling class is determined to prevent these protests from employing the weapon that can bring them down —...
The presidential election in 2024 may be the last free vote taken in the United States. Dictatorships only hold elections with predetermined outcomes or do not hold them at all. Trump is...
The murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, including the killing of the intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or...
The numerous attempts by activists in flotillas, to break the siege on Gaza, are a potent reminder that hope comes through acts of resistance and that we must never accept the status quo.
The Trump administration is consolidating the familiar machinery of terror of all authoritarian states. We must resist now. If we wait, it will be too late.
All empires, when they are dying, worship the idol of war. War will save the empire. War will resurrect past glory. War will teach an unruly world to obey. But those who bow down before...
The evisceration of the rule of law at home and abroad solidifies America as a rogue state.
The Democratic Party and its liberal allies refuse to call for mass mobilization and strikes — the only tools that can thwart Trump’s emergent authoritarianism — fearing they too will be...
El Presidente Donald Trump is the gringo version of brutal and corrupt dictators foisted on Latin American countries by their oligarchs and Yankee imperialists.
Trump’s newest presidential memoranda criminalizes critics of empire, capitalism, Christian nationalism, abuses by the state and those who fight racism and gender discrimination.
The designation of the amorphous group antifa as a terrorist organization allows the state to brand all dissidents as supporters of antifa and prosecute them as terrorists.
Martyrs are used by messianic movements to sanctify violence. To show any mercy or understanding toward the enemy is to betray the martyr and the cause the martyr died defending.
The sanctioning by the Trump administration of Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur, is an ominous harbinger of the end of the rule of international law.
The Trump administration’s refusal to release the Epstein files and videos is done not only to protect Trump, but the ruling class. They all belong to the same club.
The latest United Nations report names hundreds of corporations, banks, technology firms, universities, pension funds and charities that profit from the Israeli occupation and genocide.
Israel is weaponizing starvation. The objective is to dismantle all remnants of civil society and reduce Palestinians to herds of desperate scavengers who can be driven from historic...
The lies told to ignite the war with Iraq have been resurrected to ignite a war with Iran. The assessments of intelligence agencies and international bodies are dismissed, replaced by...
In the last days of all empires the idiots take over. They mirror the collective stupidity of a civilization that has detached itself from reality.
Once a regime starts to send people to concentration camps — including those in El Salvador — it creates a system of detention that eschews due process and disappears citizens into black...
The assault on historical memory by the Trump administration is designed to obliterate our shared understanding of reality and whitewash the crimes of the past to whitewash the crimes of...
A United Nations report, published in October, lays out in chilling detail the advances made by Israel in Gaza as it seeks to eradicate “the very existence of the Palestinian people in...
It is despair that is killing us. It fosters what the Roger Lancaster calls “poisoned solidarity,” the intoxication forged from the negative energies of fear, envy, hatred and a lust for...
Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant and the Socialist Alternative (SA) party have, for nearly a decade, waged one of the most effective battles against the city’s moneyed elites...
After 14 years of persecution, Julian Assange will go free. We must honor the hundreds of thousands of people across the globe who made this happen.
I gave this talk in Blackburn, England during a campaign event for my friend Craig Murray who is running for parliament. Like George Galloway, who was recently elected to parliament...
Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation was ultimately a religious act, one that radically delineates good and evil and calls us to resist.
Israel will appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza, it will have signed its own...
It will result in even higher levels of death and destruction.
Israel’s message, on the eve of a ground invasion, is clear. Leave Gaza or Die.
Israel, which always seeks to blame Palestinians for the atrocities it carries out, is the least trustworthy source about the bombing of the hospital in Gaza.
The failure to intervene to halt the carnage threatens to ignite violence throughout the region.
The indiscriminate shootings of Israelis by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations, the kidnapping of civilians, the barrage of rockets into Israel, drone attacks on a...
The coterie of neocons and liberal interventionists who orchestrated two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East and who have never been held to account are now stoking a war with...
The entire archive of six years of my show On Contact has been disappeared from YouTube.
The ruling elites, despite the accelerating and tangible ecological collapse, mollify us, either by meaningless gestures or denial.
The Democrats and Republicans have legalized a level of greed and fraud that even heirs of the robber barons thought unsustainable.
There is only one choice in this election. The consolidation of oligarchic power under Donald Trump or the consolidation of oligarchic power under Joe Biden.
The culture wars give the oligarchs, both Democrats and Republicans, the cover to continue the pillage.
The elites are acutely aware that without police terror and the U.S. prison system, which holds 25% of the world’s prison population, there would be intense social unrest.
We must reduce carbon emissions by 40% in the next 12 years to have a 50% chance of avoiding catastrophe.
We must organize to replace existing structures of power with ones capable of coping with the crisis before us.
The most powerful and important organs in the invisible government are the nation’s bloated and unaccountable intelligence agencies.
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 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 corporate capitalists who hold real power view Trump as an embarrassment. They would prefer to put a more dignified face on the American empire. But for the corporate elites it is...
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.
Neoliberalism transforms freedom for the many into freedom for the few. Its logical result is neofascism.
What is happening to Assange should terrify the press. And yet his plight is met with indifference and sneering contempt.
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...
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 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...
Beware the architects of our neofeudalism calling on the government to pay a guaranteed basic income
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...
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...
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...
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.
Donald Trump. King of the horrifingly dumb and dangerously greedy.
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...
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...
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...
My relatives in Maine are deplorables. I cannot write on their behalf. I can write in their defense.
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...
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...
During the presidential election cycle, liberals display their gutlessness. Liberal organizations, such as MoveOn.org, become cloyingly subservient to the Democratic Party. Liberal...
Chris Hedges on revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg in the context of the upcoming US election.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The increase in nihilistic violence such as school shootings and Friday’s lethal assault on a Planned Parenthood clinic, the frequent executions of poor people of color by police, and...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
More training, body cameras, community policing, the hiring of more minorities as police officers, a better probation service and more equitable fines will not blunt the indiscriminate...
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...
The status quo is doomed but whether the future will be progressive or reactionary is uncertain, Hedges tells Salon
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
“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”...
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...
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...
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...
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...
All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, including Israel and Hamas.
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...
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...
“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
“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.”
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...
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...
The creed of objectivity and balance, formulated at the beginning of the 19th century by newspaper owners to generate greater profits from advertisers, disarms and cripples the press...
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...
Fraternities, sororities and football, along with other outsized athletic programs, have decimated most major American universities. Scholarship, inquiry, self-criticism, moral autonomy...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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