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Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges' original columns in Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009, and granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his Truthdig essay "One Day We'll All Be Terrorists."
Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey.
Hedges began his career reporting the war in El Salvador. Following six years in Latin America, he took time off to study Arabic and then went to Jerusalem and later Cairo. He spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the bureau chief there for The New York Times. He left the Middle East in 1995 for Sarajevo to cover the war in Bosnia and later reported the war in Kosovo. Afterward, he joined the Times' investigative team and was based in Paris to cover al-Qaida. He left the Times after being issued a formal reprimand for denouncing the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq.
He has written nine books, including "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle" (2009), "I Don't Believe in Atheists" (2008) and the best-selling "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" (2008). His book "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. His latest book is "Death of the Liberal Class" (2010)
Hedges holds a B.A. in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif. Hedges speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and knows ancient Greek and Latin. In addition to writing a weekly original column for Truthdig, he has written for Harper's Magazine, The New Statesman, The New York Review of Books, Adbusters, Granta, Foreign Affairs and other publications.
(14 comments) SHARE Monday, September 16, 2019 Our Invisible Government
When an intelligence service resorts to torture, it has failed. When it relies on sadists and thugs, it has failed. All countries need good intelligence officials and agents, not the buffoons, gangsters, sadists and killers who, in the name of national security, do us so much damage.
(38 comments) SHARE Monday, September 9, 2019 The Capitalists Are Afraid
The capitalists have the power to destroy, but no longer to create. And out of their relentless destruction, which they are incapable of halting, will come the social unrest they fear and monstrosities more terrifying than Donald Trump.
(11 comments) SHARE Monday, September 2, 2019 The Last Act of the Human Comedy
Human nature does not change. It follows its familiar and cyclical patterns. Yes, this time, when we go down, the whole planet will go with us. But until then we will be mesmerized by fools and con artists. What are demagogues like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, positive psychologists and Candide-like prognosticators such as Steven Pinker other than charlatans who insist the tragedy facing us is not real?
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, August 26, 2019 The Curse of Moral Purity
The continued inability of America's liberal democratic establishment to address the ills besetting the country -- climate change, unregulated global capitalism, mounting social inequality, a bloated military, endless foreign wars, out-of-control deficits and gun violence -- means the inevitable snuffing out of our anemic democracy.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, August 19, 2019 The World According to George Galloway
There are few politicians in Britain who are attacked by the courtiers in the press and the mandarins in power more ferociously than George Galloway, a former member of Parliament and an icon of the left. He has long opposed the Western sanctions and the endless wars in the Middle East, generating charges that he is a defender of terrorists.
(8 comments) SHARE Monday, August 12, 2019 Fear vs. Fear
The endless political shows, which turn presidential campaigns into mind-numbing, two-year-long marathons, are entertainment. Do not trust anyone in power. We will save ourselves by building mass movements to overthrow corporate power. I am not certain we will succeed. But I am certain that if we fail, we are doomed.
SHARE Monday, August 5, 2019 The Artist as Prophet-2
The artist, if true to his or her vocation, recovers the past and explains the present. The artist is the true chronicler of who we were and where we came from. Culture, in times of distress, is not a luxury but a life raft.
(10 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 30, 2019 Great Flood
We are entering this final phase of civilization, one in which we are slashing the budgets of the very agencies that are vital to prepare for the devastation ahead. Hurricane after hurricane, monster storm after monster storm, flood after flood, wildfire after wildfire, drought after drought will cripple the empire, draining its wealth and resources and creating swathes of territory defined by lawlessness and squalor.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, July 22, 2019 Scapegoating Iran-2
Donald Trump's unilateral decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, although Iran was in compliance with the agreement, was the first salvo in this effort to divert attention from these failures to Iran. Bolton, the national security adviser, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, along with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, advocate the overthrow of the Iranian government.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, July 15, 2019 Worshiping the Electronic Image
There is nonstop stimulation. Seldom does anything occupy our attention for more than a few seconds. Nothing has context. Images overwhelm words. We are perpetually confused, but always entertained. We barely remember what we saw or heard a few minutes earlier. This is by design of the elites who manipulate us.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, July 8, 2019 War, Memory and Gettysburg
By focusing on battlefield exploits we too often blot out the suffering of the soldiers, the families that lost sons, brothers and husbands, and the hundreds of thousands of children left without fathers. We ignore the crippling physical and psychological wounds that plague veterans.
SHARE Monday, July 1, 2019 The Dilemma of Vladimir Lenin
There is no denying Lenin's brilliance. He redefined the political landscape of the 20th century. Decades after the Russian Revolution, in Spain, China, Cuba, Vietnam and South Africa oppressed peoples looked to Lenin and the revolution for inspiration. The social inequality and destruction of democratic institutions wrought by neoliberalism and the corporate seizure of power in our own time give relevancy to Lenin.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, June 24, 2019 Burning Down the Future
The fanning of virulent racism and Islamophobia have been convenient weapons in the hands of the elites, who seek to deflect attention from the assault they are carrying out against the entire working class and the working poor, regardless of color or ethnicity.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, June 17, 2019 The Coming Show Trial of Julian Assange
The publication of classified documents is not a crime in the United States, but if Assange is extradited and convicted it will become one. Assange is not an American citizen. WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication. The message the U.S. government is sending is clear: No matter who or where you are, if you expose the inner workings of empire you will be hunted down, kidnapped and brought to the US to be tried as a spy.
(20 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 11, 2019 First Assange. Then Us.
We must build popular movements to force the Australian government to intervene on behalf of Julian. If Julian is extradited and tried, it will create a legal precedent that will terminate the ability of the press, which Donald Trump has attacked as "the enemy of the people," to hold power accountable. First Julian. Then us.
(14 comments) SHARE Monday, June 10, 2019 The Cult of Trump
The more outrageous the cult leaders become, the more they flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders demand a God-like power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the hope that the cult leaders will save them.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, June 3, 2019 Manufacturing War With Russia
Despite the Robert Mueller report's conclusion that Donald Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia during the 2016 presidential race, the new Cold War with Moscow shows little sign of abating. Our inability to oversee or control senior intelligence officials and their agencies, which fabricate information to push through agendas embraced by the shadow state, signals the death of democracy.
(27 comments) SHARE Monday, May 27, 2019 The Mass Media Is Poisoning Us With Hate
The sins of the old media, bad though they were, are nothing compared with the sins of the new media. Mass media has degenerated into not only a purveyor of gossip, conspiracy theories and salacious entertainment but, most ominously, a purveyor of hate.
(15 comments) SHARE Monday, May 20, 2019 America's Reproductive Slaves
The birthrate decline is an indicator of the despair and hopelessness that define the lives of tens of millions of young Americans who struggle financially and see little hope for the future. Only by addressing this financial insecurity and desperation, by integrating back into society those who have been pushed aside, can the nation's death spiral be reversed.
SHARE Monday, May 13, 2019 Integrity Forged in Cages
If we do not work to eliminate the causes of poverty, the greatest of all crimes, the institutional structures that keep the poor poor, then we are responsible. There are issues of personal morality, and they are important, but they mean nothing without a commitment to social morality. Only those who have been there truly understand.