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By Sarah Stillman $19.90
By Theodore Roszak $12.89
$24
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The Truthdig columnist pledges to join others in acts of civil disobedience and nonviolent protest in Washington on Oct. 6, because, among other reasons, “we don’t have much time left.”
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 AP / Shawn Poynter
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By Chris Hedges — The writer and philosopher Wendell Berry, armed with little more than a copy of William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and his conscience, has been camped out for three days with a handful of other activists in the governor’s outer office in Frankfort, Ky.
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 AP / Ben Curtis
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By Chris Hedges — Our failures in the Middle East have consequences. We are soaked with the stench of these regimes.
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 AP / Dario Lopez-Mills
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By Chris Hedges — The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism.
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Chris Hedges talks about his new book, how he came to write it, and what we can expect from the collapse of the liberal establishment.
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 AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Chris Hedges — We can hold One Nation marches every week. It will not make any difference until we revolt against the formal structures of power.
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 AP / Mary Schwalm
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By Chris Hedges — Like the Ancients, we arrogant humans who turn ourselves into objects of worship and build ruthless systems of power to control the world around us will get what we are due.
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 AP / Eyal Warshavsky
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By Chris Hedges — Whether Gen. David Petraeus or the bearded villains wearing suicide belts, killers perpetuate new cycles of revenge and murder like bad karma. One son of a terrorist is breaking the cycle.
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With Islamophobia sweeping the states in all its stupidity and ignorance, it’s refreshing to hear this assembly of thinkers, including Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, bring some intellect to bear on the subject.
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 AP / Elise Amendola
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By Chris Hedges — Do not fear Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. Fear the underlying corporate power structure, which no one, from Barack Obama to the right-wing nut cases who pollute the airwaves, can alter.
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 Courtesy of the Arredondo family.
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By Chris Hedges — Crazed and distraught with grief, the father went into his garage and took out five gallons of gasoline and a propane torch. He walked past the three Marines in their dress blues and began to smash the windows of the government van with a hammer.
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The Truthdig columnist begins this speech to the Veterans for Peace convention by saying, “Physical courage is something you see on a battlefield. Moral courage you almost never see.”
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 AP / Emilio Morenatti
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By Chris Hedges — Desperate Israeli politicians, watching opposition to their apartheid state mount, have proposed a perverted form of what they term “the one-state solution.”
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 Nasser Shiyoukhi
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By Chris Hedges — Muslim, Christian or Jew, we ignore this suffering at the peril of our own humanity. As Rachel Corrie wrote in her last letter to her parents, “I could live a comfortable life and possibly, with no effort at all, exist in complete unawareness of my participation in genocide.”
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 AP / Maya Hitij
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By Chris Hedges — We sit passive and dumb as corporations and the leaders of industrialized nations ensure that climate change will accelerate to levels that could mean the extinction of our species. Homo sapiens, as the biologist Tim Flannery points out, are the “future-eaters.”
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 White House / Pete Souza
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By Chris Hedges — A close reading of the new health care legislation, which will conveniently take effect in 2014 after the next presidential election, is deeply depressing.
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 Flickr / BurningQuestion (CC-BY-ND)
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By Chris Hedges — We are fooled by virtual mirages into mistaking the busy, corporate hives of human activity and the salacious images and gossip that clog our minds as real. The natural world, the real world, on which our life depends, is walled off from view as it is systematically slaughtered.
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Chris Hedges, whose column would normally appear here at this time, is busy recovering from his amazing trip up and down a mountain. We’ll hear all about it, we’re sure, but until then, busy yourselves with the classics.
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Chris Hedges, whose column normally appears in this space, is currently trekking through the White Mountains with his son Thomas, Truthdig Publisher Zuade Kaufman and a band of Truthdig readers. His column will return when he does. For information on future Truthdig events, contact us or sign up for our newsletter.
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 Ari Mintz
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By Chris Hedges — Theater, which at its best makes us more human and humane, has become increasingly mediocre, produced as spectacle or driven by the presence of Hollywood celebrities.
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 Truthdig collage based on a White House photo by Pete Souza
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By Chris Hedges — Tens of millions of Americans are creating a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and shutting out all those they define as the enemy.
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 AP / Elizabeth Dalziel
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By Chris Hedges — Hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism will come with the return of the language of class conflict. It does not mean we have to agree with Karl Marx, but we have to speak in his vocabulary.
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 AP / Petros Giannakouris
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By Chris Hedges — Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out.
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 U.S. Navy / MC2 Justin Stumberg
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By Chris Hedges — These deformed individuals carrying out the global genocide against human life and the natural world lack the capacity for empathy. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications.
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 AP / Olivier Laban-Mattei
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By Chris Hedges — The traditional religious institutions are in irreversible decline. They have nothing left to say. And their aging congregants, who are fleeing the church in droves, know it. But don’t think the world will be a better place for their demise.
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 U.S. Air Force / Airman 1st Class Eboni Knox
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By Chris Hedges — We are approaching a decade of war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq is in its eighth year. The peace movement, despite the heroic efforts of a handful of groups, is dead.
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By Chris Hedges — The difference between the tea party and the secessionist movement bubbling up in some two dozen states is that the tea party believes America can be fixed.
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 AP / Hussein Malla
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By Chris Hedges — America’s greatest intellectual says, “The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies.”
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By Chris Hedges — Ernest Logan Bell, a 25-year-old Marine Corps veteran walking 90 miles to make a point, is the new face of the resistance. He is young, at home in the culture of the military, deeply suspicious of the federal government, disgusted by the liberal elite, unable to find work and angry.
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 AP / Carolyn Kaster
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By Chris Hedges — Ralph Nader’s descent from being one of the most respected and powerful men in the country to being a pariah illustrates the totality of the corporate coup.
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 AP / Jae C. Hong
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By Chris Hedges — Fritz Stern wrote “In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.” It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous.
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 AP / Muhammed Muheisen
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By Chris Hedges — The Israeli government, its brutal war crimes in Gaza exposed in detail in the U.N. report by Justice Richard Goldstone, has implemented a series of draconian measures to silence and discredit dissidents, leading intellectuals and human rights organizations inside and outside Israel.
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 AP / Ben Margot
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By Chris Hedges — Brace yourself. The American empire is over. And the descent is going to be horrifying. How do we fight back?
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 imdb.com
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It was the first Iraq war movie to really break through, and now “The Hurt Locker” has won six Academy Awards, including best picture and best director, marking the first time an Oscar for directing has gone to a woman. The movie opens with a quote from Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges. (continued)
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 AP / Chris Carlson
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By Chris Hedges — The illegal wars and occupations, the largest transference of wealth upward in American history and the egregious assault on civil liberties, all begun under George W. Bush, raise only a flicker of tepid protest from liberals when propagated by the Democrats.
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 AP / Elise Amendola
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By Chris Hedges — Now that unions have been broken, rapacious corporations like FedEx and toadies in Congress and the White House are turning workers into serfs.
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By Chris Hedges — The Internet has become one more tool hijacked by corporate interests to accelerate our cultural, political and economic decline.
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In this interview, Chris Hedges elaborates on his Truthdig column that says democracy in America is a useful fiction.
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 AP / Fareed Khan
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By Chris Hedges — The conviction of the Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui in New York last week of trying to kill American military officers and FBI agents illustrates that the greatest danger to our security comes not from al-Qaida but the thousands of shadowy mercenaries, kidnappers, killers and torturers our government employs around the globe.
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 AP / Elaine Thompson
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By Chris Hedges — Don’t blame the Internet. The bloodless and soulless journalism of the traditional media left newspapers on the wrong side of the growing class divide and their readers.
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By Chris Hedges — Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost.
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 AP / Richard Drew
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By Chris Hedges — When the bailout trillions run out, Wall Street’s maladjusted gamblers will come back for more until our currency becomes junk. Not that any of these people, who exhibit the same traits as psychopaths, have thought this through.
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 AP / Adem Hadei
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By Chris Hedges — The state and the press work hard to keep the reality of war hidden. We rarely see images that capture the evil of war, what it does to young minds and bodies.
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 AP / Mary Altaffer
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By Chris Hedges — The gravest threat we face is not from Islamic extremists, but the codification of draconian procedures that deny Americans basic civil liberties and due process.
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 Collage from fly navy and soundfromwayout
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By Chris Hedges — Ralph Nader describes his new book as a “practical utopia.” His quixotic answer to Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” it is a window into the world the consumer advocate and independent presidential candidate wishes he could create.
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 Collage: Gravel photo from Flickr / Center for American Progress Action Fund
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By Chris Hedges — Few voices in American politics have been as consistent, as reasoned and as moral as his, which is one reason why Mike Gravel, on a chilly December morning, is in front of the White House, not inside it.
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A who’s who of opponents of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan spoke at a rally at Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, on Saturday. Chris Hedges, Ralph Nader, Rep. Dennis Kucinich and more after the jump.
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 AP / Jens Meyer
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By Chris Hedges — The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.
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 U.S. Marine Corps / Cpl. Artur Shvartsberg
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Thanks to high-level leaks, we now know semiofficially that President Obama plans to deploy 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, that he will announce a time frame for withdrawal and that his exit strategy (as well as Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s) depends on the expansion of the dysfunctional Afghanistan National Army. (continued) Update
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