Quotes from Chris Hedges

But is it enough that a revolution be carried out by proletarians for it to be a proletarian revolution?" he asked. "War too is made by proletarians, but it is not, for this reason alone, a proletarian event. For it to be so, other, spiritual factors must be present. There must be more to the revolution than the question of power: there must be the question of morality, of a way of life.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.1 —Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

He was well aware, like Hugo, that good people were usually relentlessly persecuted, were rarely rewarded for virtue, and that those who held fast to truth and justice often found the way to their own cross.

The lower classes are viewed as uncouth parasites, annoyances to be endured, sometimes placated, and always controlled in the quest to amass more power and money. My hatred of authority, along with my loathing for the pretensions, heartlessness, and sense of entitlement of the rich, comes from living among the privileged.

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.

Historical memory is hijacked by those who carry out war. They seek, when the memory challenges the myth, to obliterate or hide the evidence that exposes the myth as a life. The destruction is pervasive, aided by an establishment, including the media, which apes the slogans and euphemisms parroted by the powerful. Because nearly everyone in wartime is complicit, it is difficult for societies to confront their own culpability and the life that led to it.

Wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing products. It is created by manipulating the prices of currencies, stocks, and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public.

Propaganda has become a substitute for ideas and ideology. Knowledge is confused with how we are made to feel. Commercial brands are mistaken for expressions of individuality. And in this precipitous decline of values and literacy, among those who cannot read and those who have given up reading, fertile ground for a new totalitarianism is being seeded.

They have yet to grasp that the disenfranchised do not hate them for their values. They hate them because of their duplicity, greed, use of indiscriminate industrial violence, and hypocrisy.

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. So they began 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.

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.

He asked the American revolutionaries "with what consistency, or decency," they could "complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery.

They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom of speech, the right to assembly, and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power internally that democracy is extinguished. The Constitution remains in place but has been so radically reinterpreted by the courts and by the executive and legislative branches of government, all serving corporate power, as to be essentially nullified.

The kleptocrats—and, now, those they con—have no interest in the flowery words of inclusivity, multiculturalism, and democracy that a bankrupt liberal class used with great effectiveness for three decades to swindle the public on behalf of corporations.

Paine's power, like Orwell's and Baldwin's, lay in his refusal to be anyone's propagandist. He told people, even people who supported him, what they often did not want to hear.

The myth of war creates a new, artificial reality. Moral precepts—ones we have spent a lifetime honoring—are jettisoned. We accept, if not condone, the maiming and killing of others as the regrettable cost of war. We operate under a new moral code.

Nearly half of the country is now classified as poor or low-income.

Lenin, with a handful of subordinates, carried out what became, in essence, a right-wing counterrevolution that introduced a system of repressive, centralized state capitalism and state terror.

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed," Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism.67

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.

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression," Paine said. "For if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."36 Unchecked legislatures, he warned, could be as despotic as unchecked monarchs.

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

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.

Paine posited that the self-professed virtuous people would smash the windows of the actual Christian God if God ever lived on earth.42