Chris Hedges is the best-selling author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. A quote from the book was used as the opening title quotation in the critically-acclaimed and Academy Award-winning 2009 film, “The Hurt Locker.” The quote reads: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, has written twelve books, including the New York Times bestseller Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012), which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco. Some of his other books include Unspeakable (2016), Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative to Revolt (2015), Death of the Liberal Class (2010), 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). In 2011, Nation Books published a collection of Hedges’ Truthdig columns called The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress. Hedges previously 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 again in 2011. The LAPC also 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. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and The University of Toronto. He currently teaches prisoners at a maximum-security prison in New Jersey.
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Pretty good as always, yet the concrete “what is to be done” question doesn’t really get answered. Maybe it’s impossible, but maybe he and others need to listen to that old social worker who was talking essentially about having a plan, breaking it down into pieces and taking action. This doesn’t mean we can’t change on the fly as democratically as possible (which is a necessity), but it’s almost useless to say “we need to…” The left had been saying “we need to” for forty years as things have gotten worse.
Of course, there has to be a “we” in the first place. The organizers and activists must organize each other in order to organize others. And then have something to offer everyday people, materially and ideologically. In this sense, at the moment, “we” don’t exist. I’m not putting this soley on Hedges. As one person he has done more than his share, but if he was part of an organized left, he would be able to accomplish more. Maybe his copping to being a Keynesian is part of why having a plan and building a movement isn’t at the top of his list, but that may not be fair. There is of course always a role for people of the left as public intellectuals and, well, cheerleaders. His analysis is sound, and many of his books sounded the alarm long before most people had put two and two together. His sense of urgency and yes morality is needed. His voice of urgency was rare and early, and it has been a touchstone for some on the left for decades. But, again, we, what’s left of the left (i.e., what remains), are not on the path that leads to a mass movement, let alone an international. Until we have a broad-based group or organization that offers a clear vision, a concrete way to win, and actual support to struggling people, we will not present any impediment to corporate rule and the destruction it creates.
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