Quotes from Chris Hedges

Moral cowardice like Starbuck's turns us into hostages. Mutiny is the only salvation for the Pequod's crew. And mutiny is our only salvation.

Putin has a long way to go before he matches the war crimes that we carried out in countries like Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan.

A World War II study determined that after sixty days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties. They found that a common trait among the 2 percent who were able to endure sustained combat was a predisposition toward "aggressive psychopathic personalities."3

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exists. HANNAH ARENDT, The Origins of Totalitarianism

They rigged our political process to thwart popular rule and protect the property rights of the native aristocracy. The laboring classes were to be kept at bay. The electoral college, the original power of the states to appoint senators, and the disenfranchisement of women, Native Americans, African Americans, and men without property locked most people out of the democratic process at the beginning of the republic.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities," Voltaire warned.

Journalism is about giving a voice to those who without us won't have a voice

Trump is not an anomaly. He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy.

Nationalism, the revolutionary theorist Rosa Luxemburg warned, is always a tool used to betray the working class. It is, she wrote, "an instrument of counterrevolutionary class policy."76 It unleashes powerful forms of indoctrination.

Constitutionally protected statements, beliefs, and associations are now a crime. Dissidents, even those who break no laws, can be stripped of their rights and imprisoned without due process. It is the legal equivalent of preemptive war. The state can detain and prosecute people not for what they have done, or even for what they are planning to do, but for holding religious or political beliefs that the state deems seditious.

But then 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.

Luxemburg saw this betrayal as evidence of the fundamental moral and political bankruptcy of the liberal establishment in a capitalist society. By the time the war was over, eleven million soldiers on all sides, most of them working-class men, were dead. Capitalists, who had grown rich from the slaughter, had nothing to fear now from the working class. They had fed them to the mouths of machine guns.

The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society's zeitgeist.

A failed democracy, Plato warned, creates the conditions for tyranny based on popular support.

Our major preoccupation is pleasure. Margaret Atwood, in her dystopian novel Oryx and Crake, observes that as a species "we're doomed by hope."29 The mantra is to be positive, to be happy. This mania for optimism—for happiness—leads to fantasy being mistaken for reality. Reality is dismissed when it is unpleasant.

According to the Equal Justice Initiative, "In a state with a population that is 27% black, nearly half of Alabama's death row is black and 83% of the 757 people executed by Alabama since capital punishment began in the state have been black."53

motivation of positive

Capitalist states seek to keep workers unconscious, Gramsci wrote, because no worker under a capitalist system will ever receive the full amount for his or her labor. This would destroy capitalism. Any worker who truly understood his or her interests would be dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism.

The violence of war is random. It does not make sense. And many of those who struggle with loss also struggle with the knowledge that the loss was futile and unnecessary.

Many of us, restless and unfulfilled, see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness.

In war, we always deform ourselves, our essence.

War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence-death-is hidden from public view.

The war began with words, but none of us paid any attention.'- Seka Milanovik

Socialism, in other words, would not be possible until capitalism had exhausted its ability to expand and increase profits. That the end is coming is hard now to dispute, although one would be foolish to predict when. Global capitalism, in its final iteration, may replicate China's totalitarian capitalism, a brutal system sustained by severe repression where workers are modern-day serfs.