Quotes from Chris Hedges

the disparity now gripping the United States is an inevitable consequence of white Americans' steadfast failure to confront where they came from, who they are, and the lies and myths they use to mask past and present crimes. History "is not the past," the film quotes Baldwin as saying. "History is the present. We carry our history with us. To think otherwise is criminal.

Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty," Simone Weil wrote.

Until there is a common vocabulary and a shared historical memory there is no peace in any society, only an absence of war. The fighting may have stopped in Bosnia or Cyprus but this does not mean the war is over. The search for a common narrative must, at times, be forced upon a society. Few societies seem able to do this willingly.

Whiteness is a dangerous concept. It is not about skin color. It is not even about race. It is about the self-delusion used to justify white supremacy. It is about using moral rhetoric to defend exploitation, racism, mass murder, reigns of terror, and the crimes of empire.

As it has done throughout American history, the state, under siege, will turn to extrajudicial groups of armed thugs to repress populist movements. Radical change in America is paid for with blood.

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer," D. H. Lawrence wrote. "It has never yet melted.

Violence in America is not restricted to state violence. There is a tradition of vigilante violence that is used, usually with the state's tacit if unofficial blessing, to crush dissent, to keep repressed minorities in a state of fear, or to exact revenge on those the state has branded as traitors. It is a product of hatred, not hope. It is directed against the weak, not the strong. And it is deeply ingrained in the American psyche.

traditional evangelicals." This group, which Green estimates at 12.6 percent of the population, comes "closest to the 'religious right' widely discussed in the media." It is overwhelmingly Republican. It is openly hostile to democratic pluralism, and it champions totalitarian policies, such as denying homosexuals the same rights as other Americans and amending the Constitution to make America a "Christian nation.

Paine knew liberty was intimately connected with language. And he knew that those who seek to monopolize power always use inaccessible and specialized jargon to exclude the average citizen. Paine broke these chains.

These vigilante groups have been tolerated, and often encouraged and utilized, by the ruling elite. And roaming the landscape along with these vigilante groups have been lone gunmen and mass killers who murder for money or power or to appease their own personal demons.

The idiots take over in the final days of crumbling civilizations. Idiot generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Idiot economists call for reducing taxes for corporation and the rich and cutting social service programs for the poor. They project economic growth on the basis of myth.

Vigilante groups in America do not trade violence for violence. They are mostly white men who often prey on people of color and radicals. They are capitalism's ideological vanguard, its shock troops used to break populist movements and tyrannize the oppressed. And they will be unleashed against any mass movement that seriously threatens the structures of capitalist power and calls for rebellion.

is death I defy, not my own death, but the vast enterprise of death. The dark, primeval lusts for power and personal wealth, the hypermasculine language of war and patriotism, used to justify the slaughter of the weak and the innocent and to mock justice. I do

We should feel the same pity for minds that do not eat as for stomachs. If there be anything sadder than a body perishing for want of bread, it is a mind dying of hunger for lack of light."77

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.

It is those possessed by sublime madness who keep alive another way of being. W. H. Auden captured the solitude and even futility of such a life at the end of his poem "September 1, 1939." Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.32 ———

The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world—an average of 89 per 100 people

The hatred expressed by vigilante groups for people of color, along with Jews and Muslims, is matched by their hatred for the college-educated elite. The vigilantes see people of color, along with those who espouse the liberal social values of the college-educated elites, including gun control, as contaminants to society.

But reconciliation, self-awareness, and finally the humility that makes peace possible come only when culture no longer serves a cause or a myth but the most precious and elusive of all human narratives—truth.

The cross was God's critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.

Now the battle against communism has been reconfigured. The seat of Satan is no longer in the Kremlin. It has been assumed by individuals and institutions promoting a rival religion called "secular humanism.

these humanists rank with militant vegetarians and agrarian anarchists, and were about as well known—until the Religious Right set out to make them famous.

The human imagination, as Emma Goldman pointed out, has the power to make ideas felt. Goldman noted that when Andrew Undershaft, a character in George Bernard Shaw's play Major Barbara, says that poverty is "the worst of crimes" and "all the other crimes are virtues beside it," his impassioned declaration elucidates the cruelty of class warfare more effectively than Shaw's socialist tracts.

The role of the artist, then, precisely, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest," Baldwin writes, "so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.