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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | ||
| 5e3ffcf | Hedges, Chris. 2009. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. New York: Nation Books. Legaspi, | Bandy X. Lee | ||
| 1c70849 | 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.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 49a84c0 | 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.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 3faace8 | 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.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 7fc97bc | 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.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 26b2c50 | 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. | Chris Hedges | ||
| d36f9de | 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. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 868df61 | 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 .. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 47229f2 | 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." | Chris Hedges | ||
| 062dd04 | 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.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 61564be | 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 .. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 22d942d | 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.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 344ae1d | 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.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 0f1299a | 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.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 47fd022 | 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.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 7907ae0 | 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.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 9c40f97 | 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. | Chris Hedges | ||
| b3383b7 | 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. ".. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 7685f8c | 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.. | Chris Hedges | ||
| 13542b3 | 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. | Chris Hedges |