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b1c49fc
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Pozitivisticka psihologija, poput celebrity kulture, nezadrziv nagon da se kupuje i privlacnosti masovne zabave kao sredstva odvracanja pozornosti, pothranjuje se osjecajem nesretnosti sto ga izaziva izolacija i gubitak osjecaja zajednistva. Korporativisticka postavka kako se sreca moze pronaci kroz prilagodbu i podcinjavanje korporativnoj kulturi okrutan je trik zato sto upravo korporativna kultura podrzava i hrani u ljudi tu veliku bolest..
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Chris Hedges |
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99bc17f
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Sto se vise udaljavamo i raskidamo veze sa svijetom pismenosti, svijetom napisane rijeci, svijetom slozenosti i nijanse, svijetom ideja i pojmova i zamjenjujemo ga oku ugodnim, umirujuciim slikama, fantazijama, sloganima, celebrityjima, pohlepom za nasiljem, to smo sve blizi urusavanju i imploziji. Kako nastavljamo propadati, a patnje nam narastaju, poput ljubitelja hrvackih spektakla sto se organiziraju u sklopu World Wresting Entertainmen..
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Chris Hedges |
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ac4b36a
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As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of war our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them,
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Chris Hedges |
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6b5f4c7
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This conditioning of children to fear nonconformity and blindly obey ensures continued obedience as adults. The difficult task of learning how to make moral choices, how to accept personal responsibility, how to deal with the chaos of human life is handed over to God-like authority figures. The process makes possible a perpetuation of childhood. It allows the adult to bask in the warm glow and magic of divine protection. It masks from them ..
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Chris Hedges |
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6eeb162
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The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash. I spent two years traveling the country to write a book on the Christian Right called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. I visited former manufacturing towns where for many the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. They have lost hope. Fear and instability have plunged the wor..
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Chris Hedges |
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ba3b6ad
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Permanent War One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun. --REINHOLD NIEBUHR, Beyond Tragedy
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Chris Hedges |
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f8c4993
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It is important for us to realize that emphasis on conformity and the fear of spontaneous living can have an effect almost as devastating as the totalitarian's deliberate assault on the mind . . . . Trained into conformity the child may well grow up into an adult who welcomes with relief the authoritarian demands of a totalitarian leader. It is the welcome repetition of an old pattern that can be followed without investment of a new emotion..
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Chris Hedges |
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d416260
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The difficult task of learning how to make moral choices, how to accept personal responsibility, how to deal with the chaos of human life is handed over to God-like authority figures. The process makes possible a perpetuation of childhood. It allows the adult to bask in the warm glow and magic of divine protection. It
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Chris Hedges |
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c71a3bd
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The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent.
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Chris Hedges |
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e917bbc
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This too is a jihad. Yet we Americans find ourselves in the dangerous position of going to war not against a state but against a phantom. The jihad we have embarked upon is targeting an elusive and protean enemy. The battle we have begun is never-ending. But it may be too late to wind back the heady rhetoric. We have embarked on a campaign as quixotic as the one mounted to destroy us.
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Chris Hedges |
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b726ee8
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Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, a bitter satire of Soviet life at the height of Stalin's purges, captured the surreal experience of living in the embrace of totalitarianism. Lies are considered true. Truth is considered seditious. Existence is a dark carnival of opportunism, unchecked state power, hedonism, and terror. Omnipotent secret police, wholesale spying and surveillance, show trials, censorship, mass arrests, summary ex..
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Chris Hedges |
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the portrayal of reality in the state-controlled press and popular entertainment is harmonious and pleasant. Justice, in the narratives approved for public consumption, is always served. Goodness always triumphs. Goals are always attained. This dichotomy, although not on the level of Stalin's Soviet Union or Hitler's Nazi Germany, is nevertheless present in American culture and getting worse. The gap between who we are and who we think we a..
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Chris Hedges |
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737f955
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The elite, and those who work for them, were never taught how to question the assumptions of their age. The socially important knowledge and cultural ideas embodied in history, literature, philosophy, and religion, which are at their core subversive and threatening to authority, have been banished from public discourse.
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Chris Hedges |
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695c073
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The superior force of despotic regimes is disarmed not through violence but through conversion.
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Chris Hedges |
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81a2c52
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All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit,
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Chris Hedges |
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5552d12
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The establishment of what would become the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1908--led from 1924 until 1972 by J. Edgar Hoover--was a direct response to the revolutionary wave that gripped the American working class. FBI agents, often little more than state-employed goons and thugs, ruthlessly hunted down those on the left. The FBI spied on and infiltrated labor unions, political parties, radical groups--especially those led by African Ame..
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Chris Hedges |
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494b314
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Force," Simone Weil wrote, "is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates."2"
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Chris Hedges |
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fbe8c20
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The rise of the antiwar and civil rights movements, along with the emergence of radical groups such as the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and the American Indian movement, saw a return to systematized abuse within the prison system.
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Chris Hedges |
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In rallies like those in Johnson's Ohio tour, friends, neighbors, colleagues and family members who do not conform to the ideology are gradually dehumanized. They are tainted with the despised characteristics inherent in the godless. This attack is waged in highly abstract terms, to negate the reality of concrete, specific and unique human characteristics, to deny the possibility of goodness in those who do not conform. Some human beings, t..
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Chris Hedges |
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The rebel, dismissed as impractical and zealous, is chronically misunderstood. Those cursed with timidity, fear, or blindness and those who are slaves to opportunism call for moderation and patience. They distort the language of religion, spirituality, compromise, generosity, and compassion to justify cooperation with systems of power that are bent on our destruction. The rebel is deaf to these critiques. The rebel hears only his or her inn..
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Chris Hedges |
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A culture," the poet W. H. Auden observed, "is no better than its woods." --
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Chris Hedges |
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The corporate state seeks to discredit and shut down the anticapitalist left. Its natural allies are the neo-Nazis and the Christian fascists. The alt-right is bankrolled by the most retrograde forces in American capitalism. It has huge media platforms. It has placed its ideologues and sympathizers in positions of power, including in law enforcement, the military, and the White House. And it has carried out acts of domestic terrorism that d..
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Chris Hedges |
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d6b08e5
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Johnston wrote how by 1990, "Trump's inability to pay his debts had put him at risk of losing his casinos."64 The rules of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission required casino owners to have enough liquidity to pay their bills or see their ownership license revoked. Trump would either get a government rescue package or declare bankruptcy. Casino regulators, Johnston wrote, documented that Trump was down to his last $1.6 million.65 He ha..
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Chris Hedges |
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f1bd2f6
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Prisoners are ideal employees. They do not receive benefits or pensions. They earn under a dollar an hour. Some are forced to work for free. They are not paid overtime. They are forbidden to organize and strike. They must show up on time. They are not paid for sick days or granted vacations. They cannot alter working conditions or complain about safety hazards. If they are disobedient, or attempt to protest their pitiful wages and working c..
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Chris Hedges |
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6ce7203
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We cannot pick and choose whom among the oppressed it is convenient to support. We must stand with all the oppressed or none of the oppressed. This is a global fight for life against corporate tyranny. We will win only when we see the struggle of working people in Greece, Spain, and Egypt as our own struggle. This will mean a huge reordering of our world, one that turns away from the primacy of profit to full employment and unionized workpl..
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Chris Hedges |
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78cb2d3
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If you look back in the 1930s, Leon Trotsky said that fascism was the inability of the socialist parties to come forth with an alternative," Hudson said. "If the socialist parties and media don't come forth with an alternative to this neofeudalism, you're going to have a rollback to feudalism. But instead of the military taking over the land, as occurred with the Norman Conquest, you take over the land financially. Finance has become the ne..
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Chris Hedges |
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When a population becomes distracted by trivia," wrote the cultural critic Neil Postman, "when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people becomes an audience and their public business a vaudeville, then a nation finds itself at risk: cultural-death is a clear possibility."72 Con artists and swindlers exploit the frustrations and an..
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Chris Hedges |
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The U.S. government, subservient to corporate power, has become a burlesque. The last vestiges of the rule of law are evaporating. The kleptocrats openly pillage and loot. Programs instituted to protect the common good--public education, welfare, and environmental regulations--are being dismantled. The bloated military, sucking the marrow out of the nation, is unassailable. Poverty is a nightmare for half the population. Poor people of colo..
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Chris Hedges |
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8804053
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The mantra of the "least worse" does not work--look at the steady deterioration in American politics. The "least worst" paves the way for the worst."
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Chris Hedges |
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Our capitalist elites have used propaganda, money, and the marginalizing of their critics to erase the first three of philosopher John Locke's elements of the perfect state: liberty, equality, and freedom. They exclusively empower the fourth, property. Liberty and freedom in the corporate state mean the liberty and freedom of corporations and the rich to exploit and pillage without government interference or regulatory oversight. And the si..
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Chris Hedges |
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All of the movements that opened up the democratic space in America--the abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor movement, the communists, the socialists, the anarchists, and the civil rights movement--developed a critical mass and militancy that forced the centers of power to respond. The platitudes about justice, equality, and democracy are just that. Only when ruling elites become worried about survival do they react. Appealing to the ..
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Chris Hedges |
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What Orwell feared were those who would ban books," Neil Postman wrote: What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in ..
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Chris Hedges |
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Corporate elites, rather than accept their responsibility for the global anarchy, define the clash as one between Western civilization and racist thugs and medieval barbarians. They see in the extreme nationalists, anarchists, religious fundamentalists, and jihadists a baffling irrationality that can be quelled only with force. They have yet to grasp that the disenfranchised do not hate them for their values. They hate them because of their..
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Chris Hedges |
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We extract one hundred tons of coal from the earth every two seconds in the United States, and about seventy percent of that coal comes from strip mines and mountaintop removal, which began in 1970.
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Chris Hedges |
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2e01b72
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Some 8,000 nonviolent Occupy protesters were arrested across the nation. Not one banker or investor went to jail for causing the 2008 financial meltdown. The disparity of justice mirrored the disparity in incomes and the disparity in power.
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Chris Hedges |
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The danger we face does not come from religion. It comes from a growing intellectual bankruptcy that is one of the symptoms of a dying culture. In ancient Rome, as the republic disintegrated and the Caesars were deified, as the Roman Senate became little more than an echo chamber of the emperor, the population's attention was diverted by a series of frontier wars and violent and elaborate spectacles in the arena. The excitement of entertain..
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Chris Hedges |
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7fa8248
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Moral cowardice like Starbuck's turns us into hostages. Mutiny is the only salvation for the Pequod's crew. And mutiny is our only salvation.
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Chris Hedges |
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Our return to an image-based culture means the destruction of the abstract thought made possible by a literate, print-based society. Image-based societies do not grasp or cope with ambiguity, nuance, doubt and the many layers of irrational motives and urges, some of them frightening, that make human actions complex and finally unfathomable. They eschew self-criticism for amusement. They build fantastic non-reality-based belief systems that ..
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Chris Hedges |
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Today this key component of revolution--the gap between what people want, and indeed expect, and what they get--is being played out in the United States and many states in Europe during a new age of mounting scarcity, declining wages, joblessness, government-imposed "austerity" measures, and assaults on civil liberties. The rising living standards experienced by the American working class in the 1950s have been in precipitous decline since ..
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Chris Hedges |
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By the time they were done, America's progressive and radical movements, which had given the country the middle class and opened up our political system, did not exist. It was upon the corpses of these radical movements, which had fought for the working class, that the corporate state was erected in the late twentieth century.
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Chris Hedges |
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The refusal to examine Islamic culture and traditions, the sordid dehumanization of Muslims, and the utter disregard for the intellectual traditions and culture of one of the world's great civilizations are characteristic of those who disdain self-reflection and intellectual inquiry. Confronting this complexity requires work and study rather than a retreat into slogans and cliches. And enlightened, tolerant civilizations have flourished out..
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culture
islam
religion
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Chris Hedges |
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96c040a
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The attacks by this movement on the rights and beliefs of Muslims, Jews, immigrants, gays, lesbians, women, scholars, scientists, those they dismiss as "nominal Christians," and those they brand with the curse of "secular humanist," are an attack on all of us, on our values, our freedoms and ultimately our democracy. Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice."
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Chris Hedges |
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3caf0e0
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the sack of kittens sinking in the icy creek increases the cold
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Chris Hedges |
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The cornerstone of control is the state's system of surveillance, exposed by Snowden. I saw the effect of blanket surveillance as a reporter in the Stasi sate of Communist East Germany. I was followed by men, invariably with crew cuts and leather jackets, whom I presumed to be agents of the Stasi-- the Ministry for State Security, which the ruling Communist Party described as the "shield and sword" of the nation. Stasi agents visited those ..
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Chris Hedges |