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f0123c6 Maybe it's true. Maybe we were wrong in choosing to cultivate life instead of worshipping death. But we made the choice without listening to those on the outside. Without listening to those who always demand and insist on a fight to the death, as long as others will be the ones to do the dying. We made the choice while looking and listening inward, as the collective Votan that we are. We chose rebellion, that is to say, life.18 Chris Hedges
538fa58 We do not have the tools or the wealth of the state. We cannot beat it at its own game. We cannot ferret out infiltrators. The legal system is almost always on the state's side. If we attempt to replicate the elaborate security apparatuses of our oppressors, even on a small scale, we unleash paranoia and fracture those who build movements. If we retreat into anonymity, hiding behind masks, then we provide an opening for agents provocateurs .. Chris Hedges
5b3f0d2 More than the divides of race, class, or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, our culture has been carved up into radically distinct, unbridgeable, and antagonistic entities that no longer speak the same language and cannot communicate. This is the divide between a literate, marginalized minority and those who have been consumed by an illiterate mass culture. mass-culture illiteracy Chris Hedges
b71667e A Department of Defense program known as "1033", begun in the 1990s and authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act, and federal homeland security grants to the states have provided a total of $4.3 billion in military equipment to local police forces, either for free or on permanent loan, the magazine Mother Jones reported. The militarization of the police, which includes outfitting police departments with heavy machine guns, magaz.. Chris Hedges
65f0e57 The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar. Chris Hedges
f458ef0 may Chris Hedges
edb8446 Many of the urban poor have been crippled and broken by a rewriting of laws, especially drug laws, that has permitted courts, probation officers, parole boards, and police to randomly seize poor people of color, especially African American men, without just cause and lock them in cages for years. In many of our most impoverished urban centers-- our "internal colonies", as Malcom X called them-- mobilization will be difficult. Many African A.. Chris Hedges
b136849 The Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution, which were established to protect us from unwarranted intrusion by the government into our private lives, may still technically be law but they have been judicially abolished. The Fourth Amendment was written in 1789 in direct response to the arbitrary and unchecked search powers that the British had exercised through general warrants called "writs of assistance", which played a significa.. Chris Hedges
3648aa8 The Koran is empathetic about the rights of other religions to practice their own beliefs. It unequivocally condemns attacks on civilians as a violation of Islam. It states that suicide, of any type, is an abomination. The tactic of suicide bombing, equated by many of the new atheists with Islam, did not arise from the Muslim world. This kind of terror, in fact, has its roots in radical Western ideologies, especially Leninism, not religion... suicide socialism suicide-bombing terrorism islam communism Chris Hedges
d2dff96 Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.13 Chris Hedges
a6b607d Starbuck especially elucidates this peculiar division between physical and moral courage. The first mate, "while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man."52 Starbuck is tormented by his complicity in what.. Chris Hedges
56e3065 When it shall be said in any country in the world, 'My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of happiness--when these things can be said," wrote Paine, "then may that country boast of its constitution and its government." Chris Hedges
620a533 The sweats teach you that you can't carry grudges, you can't carry hatred in your heart. It'll make you sick, so you have to learn to forgive, Chris Hedges
3e1ea61 A group trying to curtail the civil rights of gays and lesbians portrays itself, in this rhetorical twist, as victims of an effort to curtail the civil rights of Christians. One Chris Hedges
cbc6012 Five months after Zoran's disappearance, his wife gave birth to a girl. The mother was unable to nurse the child. The city was being shelled continuously. There were severe food shortages. Infants, like the infirm and the elderly, were dying in droves. The family gave the baby tea for five days, but she began to fade. "She was dying," Rosa Sorak said. "It was breaking our hearts." Fejzic, meanwhile, was keeping his cow in a field on the eas.. Chris Hedges
5f8df0a Politicians, a moribund labor movement, and the mass media--either cowed or in the service of corporate power--assure the population that the old prosperity is still attainable, but via a different route. Prosperity will no longer come from expanding the manufacturing base, which characterized the very real prosperity of working men and women immediately after World War II. The neoliberal version of the promise of rising living standards is.. Chris Hedges
2fdb4ce Revolutionists who took part in uprisings in one part of the globe would often migrate to take part in uprisings in another. Francisco de Miranda, the Venezuelan radical who launched his country's wars of liberation from Spain, went to the United States to meet with revolutionaries such as Thomas Paine, and he participated in the French Revolution. Paine fomented revolt in the United States, England, and revolutionary France, where he was i.. Chris Hedges
9b1845a Blanqui is an important, if neglected, nineteenth-century theorist, for unlike nearly all of his contemporaries, he dismissed the naive belief, central to Marx, that human history is a linear progression toward equality and greater morality. He warned that this absurd positivism is the lie perpetrated by oppressors: "All atrocities of the victor, the long series of his attacks are coldly transformed into constant, inevitable evolution, like.. Chris Hedges
335d066 In all of these countries, a significant portion of the population had abandoned their faith in the ideological constructs of power, just as previous generations had abandoned the belief in the divine right of kings. These populations turned against a corrupt ruling elite. They lost hope for a better future unless those in power were replaced. And they seized in a revolutionary moment upon an ideal--one that was often more emotional than in.. Chris Hedges
7f3d91a on the first night of the program. She waltzed around the set topless. She asked what asparagus was and said, "Rio de Janeiro, ain't that a person?" She referred to East Anglia as "East Angular," thought Portugal was in Spain, and complained that she was" Chris Hedges
459524d Revolutions can even be faux revolutions when, through the careful manipulation of counterrevolutionary forces, they demand not reform but the restoration of retrograde power elites. The Central Intelligence Agency has long been a master of this technique. It organized street demonstrations and protests in Iran in 1953 to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and his cabinet. It funded and stoked protests again in 1973 in Chile to pro.. Chris Hedges
2bfc8d8 Speculators at megabanks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law--ostensibly put in place to protect the weak from the powerful--to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They only manipulate money. They are no different from the detested speculators .. Chris Hedges
841daa9 Blind adherence to an absolute leader, especially one who permits violence, hands followers a license to unleash hidden, prohibited lusts and passions usually kept locked within the human heart. It permits followers to kill in the name of God. Chris Hedges
832155e Bulgakov and Roth understood that there is no real political ideology among decayed ruling elites. Political debate and ideological constructs for these elites are just so much absurdist theater, a cynical species of public spectacle and mass entertainment. These systems, like our own, are organized kleptocracies. Chris Hedges
c1774fa Technological advancement and wealth are conflated in capitalism with human progress. All aspects of human existence that cannot be measured or quantified--beauty, truth, love, grief, the search for meaning, and the struggle with our own mortality--are ignored and ridiculed. Chris Hedges
6ee7360 Christian activists in Massachusetts are frequent guests at Christian conferences, where they speak of their persecution by "homosexual radicals." This cultivated sense of persecution--cultivated by those doing the persecuting--allows the Christian Right to promote bigotry and attack any outcry as part of the war against the Christian faith. A" Chris Hedges
1f23c47 People often point to the London Metropolitan Police, who were formed in the 1820s by Sir Robert Peel," Vitale said when we met. "They are held up as this liberal ideal of a dispassionate, politically neutral police with the support of the citizenry. But this really misreads the history. Peel is sent to manage the British occupation of Ireland. He's confronted with a dilemma. Historically, peasant uprisings, rural outrages were dealt with b.. Chris Hedges
c2e2890 Liberalism, which Luxemburg called by its more appropriate name--"opportunism"--is an integral component of capitalism. When the citizens grow restive, it will soften and decry capitalism's excesses. But capitalism, Luxemburg argued, is an enemy that can never be appeased. Liberal reforms are used to stymie resistance and then later, when things grow quiet, revoked. The last century of labor struggles in the United States is an example of L.. Chris Hedges
0aeb041 The triviality of American popular culture, its emptiness and gossip, accelerates this destruction of critical thought.It expands the void, the mindlessness that makes the magic, mythology and irrationality of the Christian Right palatable. Television, the movement's primary medium, allows viewers to preoccupy themselves with context-free information. The homogenized empty chatter on the airwaves, the banal amusement and cliches, the bizarr.. Chris Hedges
0ee7ef4 There is no reliable data on the number of military-style assault weapons in private hands, but the working estimate is about 1.5 million. Chris Hedges
3dea19d The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world--an average of 89 per 100 people, Chris Hedges
598a7a5 Writing of Ohio megachurch pastor Rod Parsley and his close associate, GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell, he says, "[T]he heart of the Christian religion, all that is good and compassionate within it, has been tossed aside, ruthlessly gouged out and thrown into a heap with all the other inner organs. Only the shell, the form, remains. Christianity is of no use to Parsley, Blackwell and the others. In its name they kill it." Chris Hedges
27e9072 You know, I come out of the church. I not only grew up in the church but graduated from seminary, and I look at this as a mass movement. I give it very little religious legitimacy, especially the extreme wing of it. Chris Hedges
aa6bd1c How much of a conscious goal do you think that is at the upper levels of organizing with, say, somebody like Rod Parsley? I think they're completely conscious of it. The level of manipulation is quite sophisticated. These people understand the medium of television, they understand the despair and brokenness of the people they appeal to, and how to manipulate them both for personal and financial gain. I look at these figures, and I would cer.. Chris Hedges
461436d EROS AND THANATOS Beyond all this, the wish to be alone However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards However we follow the printed directions of sex However the family is photographed under the flagstaff-- Beyond all this, the wish to be alone Beneath it all desire of oblivion runs Despite the artful tensions of the calendar, The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites, .. Chris Hedges
062288b Sandy illustrated the depraved mentality of an oligarchic and corporate elite that, as conditions worsen, retreats into self-contained gated communities, guts basic services, and abandons the wider population. Chris Hedges
83b34f8 Hanna Krall's book Shielding the Flame drew on the experience of Dr. Marek Edelman, who before he died in 2009 was the sole survivor of the five-person command that led the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Chris Hedges
81408f6 Those captivated by the cult of celebrity do not examine voting records or compare verbal claims with written and published facts and reports. The reality of their world is whatever the latest cable news show, political leader, advertiser, or loan officer says is reality. The illiterate, the semiliterate, and those who live as though they are illiterate are effectively cut off from the past. They live in an eternal present. They do not unde.. Chris Hedges
30154e3 W. Bush's life is a case study in the insidious affirmative action for the rich. Chris Hedges
a086104 How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.42 Chris Hedges
c350dfe If anyone knows how fixed the Pulitzers are, it's the editors at the Times. I was part of a New York Times team that won the Pulitzer for our coverage of global terrorism. I watched the Times rig them year after year. The Times gives a lot of money to the Columbia Journalism School, which oversees the Pulitzers. The committee in return showers the paper with Pulitzers. It may be better now. I don't know. But when I was at the paper it was d.. Chris Hedges
9ffb8e1 A society convulsed by disorder and chaos, as Voegelin pointed out, elevates and even celebrates the morally degenerate, those who are cunning, manipulative, deceitful, and violent. Chris Hedges
d7f9f6f Trump is the face of our collective idiocy. Chris Hedges
4e09dfc The amount of coercion needed to make society adhere to the model is "a rough measure of the model's validity." "That the Soviet Union had to use so much coercion undermined the credibility of communism as a model of reality," he said. "It is perhaps symptomatic that the USA, a society that elevates freedom to the highest position among its values, is also the one that has one of the very largest penal systems in the world relative to its p.. Chris Hedges
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