Gaza is just the beginning, the author said in a recent speech at Princeton in which he offered a sweeping indictment of a global order collapsing into what he calls “technologically advanced barbarism.”
By ScheerPost Staff
ScheerPost
Chris Hedges’ recent speech at Princeton is not simply a commentary on the wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran — it is a sweeping indictment of a global order collapsing into what he calls “technologically advanced barbarism.”
Drawing on decades of reporting, historical analysis, and moral philosophy, Hedges argues that the atrocities unfolding today are not isolated events but the opening chapter of a far darker era.
Hedges begins with a blunt thesis: “The genocide in Gaza is the beginning.” The mass displacement of millions, the saturation bombing of civilian populations and the open defiance of international law signal the death of the post-World War II framework that once claimed to restrain state violence.
Institutions like the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, he says, have been “neutered, transformed into useless appendages of another age.”
What replaces them is a world where “there are no rules for the strong, only for the weak.”
A World Unraveling
Hedges describes a geopolitical landscape in freefall:
- Over 6 million people displaced across Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.
- A U.S. political class pushed into war with Iran by ideological zealots and lobby pressure.
- A global legal system openly ignored by the very nations that once claimed to uphold it.
The result is a moral vacuum where, as Hedges puts it, “the most psychopathic rulers of human history… have returned with a vengeance.”
The Weaponization of Memory
One of the most provocative sections of the speech examines how Holocaust memory has been distorted to shield state power rather than confront the universal dangers of genocide.
Hedges argues that many institutions dedicated to Holocaust remembrance have failed to speak out against the mass killing of Palestinians, revealing a deeper crisis of moral authority.
This silence, he warns, has “imploded the moral authority of Holocaust scholars and Holocaust memorials.”
Genocide as a Western Tradition
Hedges traces a lineage from colonial extermination campaigns to Hiroshima and beyond, arguing that genocide is not an aberration but a recurring instrument of Western empire.
Citing Langston Hughes, he reminds the audience that marginalized communities have long understood fascism not as theory but as lived experience.
“Genocide is not an anomaly. It is coded within our DNA.”
The Authoritarian Turn at Home
The repression of student protesters, the blacklisting of dissenting academics, and proposals to revoke broadcasting licenses for critics of U.S. foreign policy are, Hedges argues, the domestic echo of the violence abroad.
A “deadening silence” is descending — the silence that precedes authoritarian consolidation.
“We know where this ends.”
The Real Enemies
In one of the speech’s most striking lines, Hedges rejects the idea that America’s enemies are foreign populations:
“They are not in Palestine. They are not in Lebanon. They are not in Iran. They are here among us.”
These enemies, he says, are the political, corporate, and media elites who envision “a world of slaves and masters.”
A Final Warning
Hedges closes with a stark choice: obstruct or surrender. There are no internal mechanisms left for reform. The machinery of empire, perfected abroad, is turning inward.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
This article is from ScheerPost.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
I couldn’t agree more with Carolyn Zaremba, Tom and Rafi Simonton. Hadges is cutting as usual but at times slips into overdrive ; genocide is clearly not a Western monopoly and not all Jews are inherently racist and/or supremacists. It is the dedicated Zionists who are the hardly dying racists and the die-hard supremacists who believe that every non-Zionist and even uncommitted Zionist are inferior creatures who must be put to sleep or squashed like roaches ! Genocides have, unfortunately, occurred throughout history in one form or another across various societies and “civilizations” for various reasons. Even Genghis Khan’s barbaric genocidal onslaughts across Muslim empires had, debatably, their legitimacies but even those were not motivated by racism or far less supremacism like those practiced by the technologically-advanced Zionist barbarians of the present era and their butt-lickers across the world !
The least our country, now run by plutocrats, can do, is stop getting into elective wars with oil exporting countries in the Middle East. Fighting against Iranians, a generally peaceful people, represents the actions of a declining empire going round the world grabbing whatever resources they can.
Hedges is correct in many ways, but in the end he is a dedicated pessimist and pessimism does not energize a revolutionary movement. On the contrary, pessimism paralyzes people. We need to be sharpening our guillotines and preparing rope of our own with which to hang these fascists the way Mussolini was hanged. Upside down in a public place for the world to see.
There are three primary forces driving this moment: the extreme disproportionate distribution of wealth (created by abundance); the extreme disproportionate application of just treatment (created by mismatch of human emotional capacities with situational realities); nearly complete disconnection of human action from environmental and primary economic realities (created by our vast numbers and our vast powers of material manipulation).
Of course it is true that ‘submit or obstruct’ are the only options for the Great Many; but how do we submit or obstruct? Do we obstruct with the demand that the abundance of the Impunity Class should come to everyone in some measure? Or do we obstruct in the knowledge that it is that very abundance that drives the distortions of situational sociopathy? Do we submit in the hope of ‘returning’ to the ‘normal’ of the last moment in which we felt at least some sense of safety?
As as long as the human animal is incapable of submitting to ecological restraints, obstructing the unavoidable sociopathy of created privilege will only continue to cycle our species through greater and greater destructive drama (which is the essence of our history).
“To sanctify Jews as eternal victims.” If the last few decades of the Zionist’s “project” is any indication of past behavior, condemnation and retribution is imminent, and well deserved.
I’ve never read anything quite like this before. A few years ago such statements were unthinkable. To say anything against the state of Israel has always been the great taboo. Yet for years I’ve been silently thinking the same thing as what Hedges speaks, but afraid to say it out loud.
The cynical manipulation of people’s natural sympathies for the Jewish holocaust at the hands of the Nazi’s, to keep this tragedy ever at the forefront of people’s consciousness, thereby creating a psychological barrier to criticizing current Zionist Israel, coupled with making “antisemitism” the supreme crime, superior to, and standing above all other forms of human discrimination and hatred, is nothing but bullshit propaganda to create a cover for more genocide against the Palestinians and Lebanese at the hands of the racist Israelis. What group in history has suffered the most from discrimination? Is it blacks here in America and in Africa? Is it American Indians who were starved and slaughtered and forced on death marches, while like Palestinians their lands were stolen? Was it the Armenian death march and genocide in 1915? Is it the Irish, who suffered a million deaths from the potato famine while the British kept exporting Irish food?
The Jewish holocaust in Germany was not the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world. The Jewish holocaust was but one of many extreme acts of mass cruelty and hatred in the course of human history, all equally unspeakable. Like infinite numbers human suffering can’t be quantified. The pain of parents watching their children murdered is equal across all ethnic groups. Cruelty is unmeasurable, be it against Jews, blacks, Indians, Armenians….
Thanks to the work of Hedges and others, it is now OK to say that the Jewish holocaust was but one of many devastating and horrific historic events exhibiting the human propensity for cruelty of one group against another. But all are unacceptable, and not one is above (below) the other. The Jewish holocaust does not stand in history as the worst of the worst. These terrible events of history are all equally without measure in their unspeakable horrificity, all equal in their responsive engendered revulsion, and therefore equally bad, terrible and unspeakable. Different in kind perhaps, but equal and unmeasurable in terrible consequence. The suffering of a black man or an American Indian or an Armenian force marched to death across the dessert, or the suffering of a Jew in the WW II German ghetto, are equally bad. All human suffering is unmeasurable and therefor equal. All is unacceptable.
All groups suffering from hatred and discrimination suffer equally. A special Jewish category of historic suffering above all other examples of cruelty in history is just propaganda. Israel, acting today as Nazi’s against the Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranians, do not get a pass because 85 years ago they were the victims of the same behaviors they now inflict on others. Jews are not special. They are not more or less than others. They are equal. They do not get special rights to kill, maim, starve, and ethnically exterminate because of their past.
Chris Hedges might be one of the great truth tellers of our time. I am in awe.
Tom, My hat goes off to you as you stated your comment with concise and illuminating truth of some the various “holocausts” throughout recorded history. The Nazis murdered approximately 16 million Russian “civilians” during WWII, as the Waffen SS massacred whole villages of Slavic Russians, which would make it the largest “holocaust” in human history. The second biggest “holocaust” would be the murder of between 12-20 million Chinese by the Japanese Imperial Army from the mid 1930’s until the end of WWII, which most people, Americans, anyway, have never heard of. But the Jewish people (not all of them, of course) have exploited the Final Solution victims for their own nefarious benefits, and as in Gaza the past 2 1/2 years, are just as bad or even worse than the Waffen SS camp guards, blowing up schools, hospitals, and gunning down women and children while laughing about it.
I liked the photograph of Geronimo, the Apache, with some of the warriors along side of him and the caption below, which was:
“Homeland security, since 1492.”
I definitely appreciate your accurate comment!
jewsdemandaction dot org
Thanks, Frank. I’ve been in pain this last couple of years watching the events unfold in Gaza. I feel shame for American complicity. I feel less helpless and hopeless since I’ve started tentatively to speak out. Maybe the only thing we can do is try to pick off the minds and hearts out there one at a time until we reach a critical mass. It’s really is quite simple as my friend Peter says, right is right and wrong is wrong. All credit to consortium news, Joe Lauria, Patrick Lawrence, and many others giving of their time, and of course, the amazing Chris hedges.
Thanks, Tom. I know the feeling and I am doing a similar thing, trying to educate those who don’t read, think critically, and some of them are now understanding how they’ve been conned and lied to by our government operatives and the mainstream media news commentators with biased news on certain events. Lauria, Hedges, Lawrence, and other truth tellers work hard, digging for the facts and are beacons of light.
“I am in awe.”
As most of us are Tom. The speech Mr. Hedges gave was so eloquently presented and historically correct. Would that the majority of western populations realise the truth of our history.
My take, easy?
Given that “…extreme acts of mass cruelty and hatred…” being but one aspect of the longitudinal, overall mental development reality, in humans’ history, real enlightenment would only take the courage of each one of ‘us’ looking in a mirror to see an example of the falsity of any notion of binary truth, when it comes to the ‘evolution’ of the Homo sapiens species.
“Like infinite numbers… Cruelty is unmeasurable”. What ‘we’ seemingly have yet to recognize, looking in the mirror, at this belated point in ‘our’ common history, is the obscure danger in ourselves; that we are a tad more complex than the ‘either-or’ ‘us them’ of binary theory.
The underlying behind the external threat to all of humanity, that we are now witnessing lies in the soul of the all-encompassing human psyche.
An extraordinarily enlightened, crystal clear appraisal of the situation in which we find ourselves in today. Amid the chaos and orchestrated confusion a beacon of wisdom and common sense.
On Passover and Maunday Thursday, April 2nd, an Inglewood CA church
hung a banner outside on the church wall.
It reads “ Episcopalians stand for SANCTUARY not DEPORTATION”.
I hope this might be read as an attempt to obstruct.
May we never surrender.
I don’t know what Episcopalians stand for. But I know what their Church stands for. I worked as a porter for the Real Estate Corporation of Trinity Church, the main office of the whole organization. It’s located on Wall Street. I got to see their principles, their morals, the whole tone of the operation. They believe in one thing- money. You don’t really know these people until you see them up close and from below. They’re gangsters. Anything with a dollar attached looks good to them.
It’s not just the neocon fantasy of a unipolar world, political and economic empire enforced militarily. It’s also a rehearsal for what’s to come when an econ system based on the assumption endless growth is possible on a finite planet finally collapses. When the looming ecological disasters the econopaths declare irrelevant cause massive destruction.
The 100s of millions of climate refugees, if not killed outright at the borders, will be herded into concentration camps. Citizens are to accept this as necessary for national defense. Anyone objecting on moral or philosophical grounds will be silenced; activists will be imprisoned. U.S. precedent from W.W.I when conscientious objectors like Quakers and labor activists like Eugene Debs who denounced wars of empire were sent to prison. Laws still active.
The global North is not immune; the same tragedies will play out internally, too. The majority will face exorbitant food costs, falling wages and rising unemployment, underfunded dysfunctional governments, and failing power grids. While the 1/10th of 1%ers escape the chaos they caused on their megayachts and private islands. They will, however, allow survivors who are properly subservient to become neo-serfs for their neo-fiefdoms.
Chris is right–it’s now or never. Obstruct or surrender.
This is an ‘other’ man who sees himself as an Arab Jew. He needs to be heard, especially at this critical moment of change in the incoming new world order.
Alon Mizrahi of The Mizrahi Perspective
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdZQEkKieNc
You’re right. He’s very good. Thanks.