The Chris Hedges Report Podcast

A century ago, on November 18, 1922, Marcel Proust died. He worked feverishly in his final hours on his masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu, In Search of Lost Time. His 4,000 page novel is one of the most remarkable works of literature of the 20th century. During the war in Bosnia, I plowed my way through its seven volumes, populated with 400 characters, not as an escape from the war, for th...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Cover Design by Mr. Fish Writing on War And Living in a World from Hell By Chris Hedges As this century began, I was writing War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning , my reflections on two decades as a war correspondent, 15 of them with the New York Times , in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, Bosnia, and Kosovo. I worked in a small, sparsely furnished studio apartment...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text Published 10/30/2022 The poet Gerald Stern , who died last Friday at the age of 97, spent his life thundering against the mendacity and abuse of power; rebelling against all forms of authority, big and small; defying social conventions; and wielding his finely honed writing on behalf of the demonized, forgotten and oppressed. He was one of our great political poets. Po...

In the months of July and September 1940 the French historian and future resistance fighter Marc Bloch, who fought in World War I and World War II, wrote a short book called L'Étrange Défaite or Strange Defeat. It was a searing condemnation of the French high command and political class which was responsible for the humiliating defeat and disintegration of the French army with the Nazi invasion of...

Narrated by Eunice Wong The Body Politic - by Mr. Fish The bipartisan project of dismantling our democracy, which took place over the last few decades on behalf of corporations and the rich, has left only the outward shell of democracy. The courts, legislative bodies, the executive branch and the media, including public broadcasting, are captive to corporate power. There is no institution left tha...

No one, including the most bullish supporters of Ukraine, expect the nation’s war with Russia to end soon. The fighting has been reduced to artillery duels across hundreds of miles of front lines and creeping advances and retreats. Ukraine, like Afghanistan, will bleed for a very long time. This is by design. The militarists who have waged permanent war costing trillions of dollars over the past t...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Bombs Away - by Mr. Fish I have covered enough wars to know that once you open that Pandora’s box, the many evils that pour out are beyond anyone’s control. War accelerates the whirlwind of industrial killing. The longer any war continues, the closer and closer each side comes to self-annihilation.  Unless it is stopped, the proxy war between Russia and the U.S. in Ukraine...

All intellectuals of our generation, at least if they are honest intellectuals, are in some sense children of Noam Chomsky. No single contemporary intellectual has broken more ground or elucidated more of our reality as a society, nation and empire than Noam Chomsky. He is a world-renowned linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, essayist, social critic and political activist. He is the author...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Song - by Mr. Fish August Wilson wrote 10 plays chronicling Black life in the 20th century. His favorite, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone , is set in 1911 in a boarding house in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. The play’s title comes from “Joe Turner’s Blues,” written in 1915 by W. C. Handy. That song refers to a man named Joe Turney, the brother of Peter Turney, who was the governor...

All intellectuals of our generation, at least if they are honest intellectuals, are in some sense children of Noam Chomsky. No single contemporary intellectual has broken more ground or elucidated more of our reality as a society, nation and empire than Noam Chomsky. He is a world-renowned linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, essayist, social critic and political activist. He is the author...

Dr. Gabor Maté in his new book “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture,” which he wrote with his son Daniel, argues that what is defined as normal in a consumer society is at war with basic human needs.  The engine of capitalism, defined by the cult of the self, thrives on the fostering of psychological and physical chronic disorders, including high blood pressure, dia...

When one makes a commitment to become a Christian, he, or she, if they are serious, are required to lift and bear the cross. This is not a rhetorical feign. If you take this call seriously it means a life in perpetual opposition to power, including the institution of the church itself, and a commitment to always stand with those the theologian James Cone calls the crucified of the earth. It is a h...

Roger Waters, the British rock legend and co-founder of Pink Floyd, is in the midst of his “This Is Not A Drill” tour. In his concerts he weds his musical genius to the most pressing social issues of our day, including permanent war, police violence, the crimes of Israeli occupation against the Palestinians, including the killing of the Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by the Israeli milit...

Narrated by Eunice Wong The Bankruptcy of the Liberal Ass - by Mr. Fish Energy and food bills are soaring. Under the onslaught of inflation and prolonged wage stagnation, wages are in free fall. Billions of dollars are diverted by Western nations at a time of economic crisis and staggering income inequality to fund a proxy war in Ukraine. The liberal class, terrified by the rise of neo-fascism and...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Strike, Strike, Strike - by Mr. Fish The ruling oligarchs are terrified that, for tens of millions of people, the economic dislocation caused by inflation, stagnant wages, austerity, the pandemic and the energy crisis is becoming unendurable.  They warn , as Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and NATO Secretary General Jens Sto...

A society that prohibits the capacity to speak in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in justice. Tyrannies invert the rule of law. They turn the law into an instrument of injustice. They cloak their crimes in a faux legality. They use the decorum of the courts and trials, to mask their criminality. Those, such as Julian Assange, who expose that criminality to the public are dangerous, for wit...

Image: Pictograph by Red Horse, 1881 The playwright Eugene O’Neill said that one of the few events worth celebrating in American history took place on June 25, 1876, when Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho, led by Crazy Horse and Chief Gall, annihilated a unit of the 7th Cavalry under the command of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer. There are few battles in American history that have generated...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Off With Her Head — by Mr. Fish The fawning adulation of Queen Elizabeth in the United States, which fought a revolution to get rid of the monarchy, and in Great Britain, is in direct proportion to the fear gripping a discredited, incompetent and corrupt global ruling elite. The global oligarchs are not sure the next generation of royal sock puppets - mediocrities that incl...

What are we to make of a Democratic Party that has embraces an election strategy that includes demobilizing the majority working-class non-Republican electorate; legitimizing right-wing agendas and narratives; seeks bipartisan cooperation with right-wing politicians such as Liz Cheney; refuses to attack archaic minority rule institutions including the Electoral College and the Senate filibuster; r...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Endgame - by Mr. Fish There is a fatal disconnect between a political system that promises democratic equality and freedom while carrying out socioeconomic injustices that result in grotesque income inequality and political stagnation. Decades in the making, this disconnect has extinguished American democracy. The steady stripping away of economic and political power was ig...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Originally posted 08/28/2022 War Inc. - by Mr. Fish No one, including the most bullish supporters of Ukraine, expect the nation’s war with Russia to end soon. The fighting has been reduced to artillery duels across hundreds of miles of front lines and creeping advances and retreats. Ukraine, like Afghanistan, will bleed for a very long time. This is by design. On August 24,...

The Ukraine conflict has plunged the world into a geopolitical crisis. But this is not, as the writer Patrick Lawrence points out, the only crisis. The war in Ukraine has exacerbated the crisis within the western press, inflicting damage that he believes is ultimately irreparable. The press in the U.S. and most of Europe slavishly echoes the opinions of a ruling elite and oversees a public discour...

Illustration by Joe Ciardiello W.E.B Du Bois was the first Black to earn a doctorate from Harvard University, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, and the Niagara Movement, and one of the seminal scholars of American history, author of works such as The Souls of Black Folk , The Philadelphia Negro , his ethnographic survey of Black life t...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text Originally published 07/31/2022 Pig and Whistle -by Mr. Fish MARION, Illinois — Daniel Hale, dressed in a khaki uniform, his hair cut short and sporting a long, neatly groomed brown beard, is seated behind a plexiglass screen, speaking into a telephone receiver at the federal prison in Marion, Illinois. I hold a receiver on the other side of the plexiglass and listen a...

On Jan. 9, 1966, the White Knights of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan murdered the Black civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer in Hattiesburg, Mississippi after fire-bombing and shooting into his house. It was one of thousands of hate crimes conducted in the south by whites who waged a reign of terror against Blacks to frighten them from abandoning calls for desegregation and voting rights. These attac...