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1c70849
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Armed combatants in war, who surrender their individuality and usually their capacity for moral choice, become part of a herd of dehumanized killers. Sex in wartime is reduced to its crudest biological function. It is referred to in marching cadences and ribald small talk like defecation. Pornography, prostitution, and rape are ubiquitous in war zones. In war, empathy, compassion, and love are banished. Human beings, especially women, becom..
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Chris Hedges |
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49a84c0
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Slot machines cater, like the games on computers and phones, to the longing to flee from the oppressive world of dead-end jobs, crippling debt, social stagnation, and a dysfunctional political system. They shape our behavior with constant bursts of stimulation. We become rats in a Skinner box. We frantically pull levers until we are addicted and, finally entranced, by our adrenaline-driven compulsion to achieve fleeting and intermittent rew..
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Chris Hedges |
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3faace8
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The pipeline was designed to pass about a mile north of the Standing Rock Sioux tribal nation. The Energy Transfer Partners engineers planned to run the 30-inch-diameter steel pipe 90 to 110 feet under the Missouri River.31 This land was ceded to the Sioux under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which, like some four hundred treaties the U.S. government signed with Native American communities, was promptly violated by Washington.32 The Misso..
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Chris Hedges |
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7fc97bc
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The radical left and the radical right, each made up of people who have been cast aside by the cruelty of corporate capitalism, have embraced holy war. Their marginalized lives, battered by economic misery, have been filled with meaning. They hold themselves up as the vanguard of the oppressed. They claim the right to use force to silence those defined as the enemy. They sanctify anger. They are consumed by the adrenaline-driven urge for co..
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Chris Hedges |
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26b2c50
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As long as personal, violent catharsis masquerades as acts of resistance, the corporate state is secure. Indeed, the corporate state welcomes this violence because violence is a language it can speak with a proficiency and ruthlessness that none of these groups can match.
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Chris Hedges |
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d36f9de
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There is no moral equivalency between antifa and the alt-right. But by brawling in the streets, antifa allows the corporate state, which is terrified of a popular anticapitalist uprising, to use the false argument of moral equivalency to criminalize the work of all dissidents.
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Chris Hedges |
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868df61
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A march held in Sacramento, California, in June 2016 by the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party to protest attacks at Trump rallies ended with a number of people stabbed.114 Police accused counter-protesters of initiating the violence.115 It is a short series of steps from bats and ax handles to knives to guns. The conflict will not end until followers of the alt-right and the anticapitalist left are given a living wage and a voice in how ..
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Chris Hedges |
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47229f2
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As long as the powers that be are in control, the oppression isn't going to go anywhere," he said. "It's really going to take people to unite worldwide, not just in America, not just in St. Louis, not just in one particular city or state. It's gonna have to be people identifying their struggles with each other worldwide, internationally, and say enough is enough. That's the only way oppression will ever leave."
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Chris Hedges |
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062dd04
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States, in the name of austerity, have stopped providing prisoners with essential items including shoes, extra blankets, and even toilet paper, while starting to charge them for electricity and room and board. Most prisoners and the families that struggle to support them are chronically short of money. When they go broke--and being broke is a frequent occurrence in prison--prisoners must take out prison loans to pay for medications, legal a..
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Chris Hedges |
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61564be
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People think of a parasite as simply taking money, taking blood out of a host or taking money out of the economy. But in nature it's much more complicated. The parasite can't simply come in and take something. First of all, it needs to numb the host. It has an enzyme so that the host doesn't realize the parasite's there. And then the parasites have another enzyme that takes over the host's brain. It makes the host imagine that the parasite ..
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Chris Hedges |
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22d942d
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Slavery is legal in prisons under the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which reads: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States."49 Prisoners are not covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act requiring workers to be paid the minimum wage. The highest hourly wage in prison rarely exceeds $2 and most prisoners e..
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Chris Hedges |
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344ae1d
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Corporate investors, who have poured billions into the business of mass incarceration, expect long-term returns. And they will get them. It is their lobbyists who write the draconian laws that demand absurdly long sentences, deny paroles, determine immigrant detention laws, and impose minimum-sentence and Three-Strikes laws, which mandate life sentences after three felony convictions. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest ow..
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Chris Hedges |
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0f1299a
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Prisoners work, often through subcontractors, for major corporations such as Chevron, Bank of America, IBM, Motorola, Microsoft, McDonald's--which makes its uniforms in prison--AT&T, Starbucks, which manufactures holiday products, Nintendo, Victoria's Secret, JC Penney, Sears, Walmart, Kmart, Eddie Bauer, Wendy's, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Fruit of the Loom, Caterpillar, Sara Lee, Quaker Oats, Mary Kay, Microsoft, Texas Instrumen..
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Chris Hedges |
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47fd022
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The political squabbles that dominate public discourse almost never question the sanctity of private property, individualism, capitalism or imperialism. They hold as sacrosanct American "virtues." They insist that Americans are a "good" people steadily overcoming any prejudices and injustices that may have occurred in the past. The debates between the Democrats and the Whigs, or today's Republicans and Democrats, are rooted in the same alle..
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Chris Hedges |
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7907ae0
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If you care about other people that's now a very dangerous idea," Noam Chomsky suggests. "If you care about other people you might try to organize or to undermine power and authority. That's not going to happen if you care only about yourself. Maybe you can become rich, you don't care whether other people's kids can go to school or afford food to eat or things like that. In the United States that's called libertarian for some wild reason. I..
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Chris Hedges |
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9c40f97
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The cri de coeur of this lost generation, orphans of global capitalism, rises up from deindustrialized cities across the nation. This generation has been cast aside by a society that views them as cogs, menial wage slaves who will do the drudgery that plagues the working poor in postindustrial America.
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Chris Hedges |
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b3383b7
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It takes brutality and force to make a person work for free and live in the type of conditions we live in and not do anything about it," Ray said. "The only way they made slavery work was to use force. It is no different in the slave empire of prisons. They use brutality to hold it together. And this brutality will not go away until the system goes away." "They stood me up against the wall [with my hands cuffed behind me]," Pleasant said. "..
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Chris Hedges |
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7685f8c
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The capitalist who does no useful work has the economic power to take from a thousand or ten thousand workingmen all they produce, over and above what is required to keep them in working and producing order, and he becomes a millionaire, perhaps a multi-millionaire. He lives in a palace in which there is music and singing and dancing and the luxuries of all climes. He sails the high seas in his private yacht. He is the reputed "captain of i..
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Chris Hedges |
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13542b3
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Many of America's policing techniques, including widespread surveillance, were pioneered and perfected in American colonies such as the Philippines before being introduced to police departments in the United States. Blacks in the South had to be controlled. Labor unions and radical socialists had to be broken.
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Chris Hedges |
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90f6e86
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We once had within our capitalist democracy liberal institutions--the press, labor unions, political third parties, civic and church groups, public broadcasting, well-funded public universities, and a liberal wing of the Democratic Party--that were capable of responding to outside pressure from movements. They did so imperfectly. They provided only enough reforms to save the capitalist system from widespread unrest or, with the breakdown of..
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Chris Hedges |
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aa34709
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When facts are treated as if they were opinions, when there is no universal standard by which to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in the reporting of events of the day, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe, where there is no possibility of reaching any conclusion not predetermined by those who interpret the official, divinely inspired text.
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religion
science
truth
dominionism
fanaticism
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Chris Hedges |
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a90872c
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A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wis- dom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death. Morality is the product of a civilization, but the elites know little of these traditions. They are products of a moral void. They lack clarity about themselves and their c..
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Chris Hedges |
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51c0674
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shutdown your electronic hallucinations. Turn off Facebook, don't put anything in your ears, throw out your TV. I don't Tweet. You have to read!
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Chris Hedges |
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5eda73e
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Fines, often in the thousands of dollars, are assessed against many prisoners when they are sentenced. There are twenty-two fines that can be imposed in New Jersey, including the Violent Crime Compensation Assessment (VCCA), the Law Enforcement Officers Training & Equipment Fund (LEOT), and Extradition Costs (EXTRA). The state takes a percentage each month out of a prisoner's wages to pay for penalties. It can take decades to pay fines. Som..
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Chris Hedges |
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4ae23e6
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Those who manipulate the shadows that dominate our lives are the agents, publicists, marketing departments, promoters, script writers, tel- evision and movie producers, advertisers, video technicians, photogra- phers, bodyguards, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers, and television news personalities who create the vast stage for illusion. They are the puppet masters.
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Chris Hedges |
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3f54c10
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We try to see ourselves moving through our life as a camera would see us, mindful of how we hold ourselves, how we dress, what we say. We invent movies that play inside our heads. We imagine ourselves the main characters. We imagine how an audience would react to each event in the movie of our life.
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Chris Hedges |
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1211e91
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Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice.
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intolerance
tolerance
passivity
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Chris Hedges |
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3b80a2b
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It is sometimes said that, by virtue of his psychological make-up, man cannot live unless he attaches himself to an object that is greater than himself and outlives him, and this necessity has been attributed to a supposedly common need not to perish entirely. Life, they say, is only tolerable if one can see some purpose in it, if it has a goal and one that is worth pursuing. But the individual in himself is not sufficient as an end for him..
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Chris Hedges |
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35884eb
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the Christian Right and radical Islamists, although locked in a holy war, increasingly mirror each other. They share the same obsessions. They do not tolerate other forms of belief or disbelief. They are at war with artistic and cultural expression. They seek to silence the media. They call for the subjugation of women. They promote severe sexual repression, and they seek to express themselves through violence.
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Chris Hedges |
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7f7da9a
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Real life, our own life, is viewed next to the lives of celebrities as inadequate and inauthentic.
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Chris Hedges |
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This cult of distraction, as Rojek points out, masks the real disintegration of culture. It conceals the meaninglessness and emptiness of our own lives. It seduces us to engage in imitative consumption. It deflects the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperial wars, economic collapse, and political corruption. The wild pursuit of status and wealth has destroyed our souls and our economy. F..
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Chris Hedges |
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70f839e
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We have the facade of a functioning capitalist democracy but underneath it is a species of corporate totalitarianism.
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Chris Hedges |
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be550b7
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A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.
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Chris Hedges |
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fef2e8b
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For years we were called niggers to indicate we had no value or worth and that anything could be done to us,' Ray said. 'Then the word "nigger" became politically incorrect. Sio they began to calling us criminals. When you say a person is a criminal it means that what happens to them does not matter. It means he or she is a nigger. It means they deserve what they get.' - Melvin Ray"
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Chris Hedges |
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0fd01a0
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Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.
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Chris Hedges |
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07539c3
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In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.
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Chris Hedges |
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77378b6
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That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old "proletarians" are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new ..
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Chris Hedges |
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fd7b43b
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But grabbing what you can, as John Ruskin said, isn't any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists.
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Chris Hedges |
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fb968f8
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Identities and morality shift with the wind. Established truths, mores, rules, and authenticity mean nothing. Good and evil mean nothing. The idea of permanent personalities and permanent values, as in the culture at large, has evaporated. It is all about winning. It is all about personal pain, vendettas, hedonism, and fantasies of revenge, while inflicting pain on others. It is the cult of victimhood.
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Chris Hedges |
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1f147c9
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Celebrity culture has bequeathed to us what Benjamin DeMott calls "junk politics." Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. It personalizes and moralizes issues rather than clarifying them. "It's impatient with articulated conflict, enthusiastic about America's optimism and moral character, and heavily dependent on feel-your-pain language and gesture," DeMott notes. The result of junk politics is that nothing chang..
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Chris Hedges |
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37e22fe
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Trump is not an anomaly. He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy.
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Chris Hedges |
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425c446
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The ability to amplify lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives lies and mythical narratives the aura of uncontested truth. We become trapped in the linguistic prison of incessant repetition. We are fed words and phrases like war on terror or pro-life or change, and within these narrow parameters, all complex thought, ambiguity, and self-criticism vanish.
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Chris Hedges |
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0a49f28
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The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society's zeitgeist.
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Chris Hedges |
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cbe5b79
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motivation of positive
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Chris Hedges |