Chris Hedges: State

Chris Hedges is American journalist. Explore interesting quotes on state.

Chris Hedges: 162 quotes31 likes

“It is one of the great ironies of corporate control that the corporate state needs the abilities of intellectuals to maintain power, yet outside of this role it refuses to permit intellectuals to think or function independently.”

Chris Hedges

Source: The Death of the Liberal Class

“The United States … celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.”

Chris Hedges

“Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System” (2011)

“Totalitarianism no longer comes in the form of communism or fascism. It comes now from corporations. And these corporations fear those who think and write, those who speak out and form relationships freely. Individual freedom impedes their power and their profits. Our democracy, as Snowden I think has revealed, has become a fiction. The state, through elaborate forms of political theater, seeks to maintain this fiction to keep us passive. And if we wake up, the state will not shy away from draconian measures. The goal is complete subjugation, the iron rule of our corporations and our power elite.”

Chris Hedges

Source: “ 25:13 Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOlg_2qAbUA” (2014)

“There are no internal or external checks on the deep state. The democratic institutions, including the press, that once gave citizens a voice and a say in the exercise of power have been neutered. The deep state will further the corporate consolidation of wealth and power, expand the social inequality that has thrust half of Americans into poverty or near poverty, strip us of our remaining civil liberties and feed the rapacious appetites of the military and the war industry.”

Chris Hedges

"The Enemy Within" (2019)

“We now live in what the German political scientist Ernst Fränkl called the dual state. Totalitarian states are always dual states. … The outward forms of democracy, of democratic participation, voting, competing political parties, judicial oversight and legislation remain, but are hollow political stagecraft. And Fränkl called those who wield this unchecked power over the citizenry “the prerogative state.” The masses in a totalitarian structure live in what he termed “the normative state.””

Chris Hedges

The normative state, he said, is defenseless against the abuses of the prerogative state. 36:15 “ Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOlg_2qAbUA” (2014)

“The glitz and propaganda, the ridiculous obsessions imparted by our electronic hallucinations, and the spectacles that pass for political participation mask the deadly ecological assault by the corporate state. The worse it gets, the more we retreat into self-delusion. We convince ourselves that global warming does not exist. Or we concede that it exists but insist that we can adapt. Both responses satisfy our mania for eternal optimism and our reckless pursuit of personal comfort. In America, when reality is distasteful we ignore it. But reality will soon descend like the Furies to shatter our complacency and finally our lives. We, as a species, may be doomed. And this is a bitter, bitter fact for a father to digest.”

Chris Hedges

Truthdig, Life Is Sacred, Sep 3, 2012 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/life_is_sacred_20120903/

“This deadly impasse, the tightening of the corporate totalitarian noose, would have continued if Snowden had not jolted the nation awake by disclosing the massive crimes of the prerogative state.”

Chris Hedges

39:25 “ Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOlg_2qAbUA” (2014)

“Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals—themselves.”

Chris Hedges

“Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System” (2011)

“Reform will come and only come through the building of mass movements and alternative centers of power that can overthrow—let me repeat that word for Homeland Security—overthrow the corporate state. If we fail to sever these chains, we will become like many who did not rise up in time to save their civil society’s human chattel. This means we too must defy the law and engage in civil disobedience”

Chris Hedges

42:45 “ Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOlg_2qAbUA” (2014)

“To be judged by the state as an innocent, is to be guilty. It is to sanction, through passivity and obedience, the array of crimes carried out by the state.”

Chris Hedges

“Happy as a Hangman,” truthdig.com http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/happy_as_a_hangman_20101206/, December 6, 2010

“All those who challenge the abuses of power by the prerogative state, like Snowden, who expose the crimes carried out by government, are turned into criminals. Totalitarian states always invert the moral order. It is the wicked that rule, and it is the just that are damned.”

Chris Hedges

37:55 “ Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOlg_2qAbUA” (2014)

“Moral courage … is always defined by the state as treason. … It is the courage to act and speak the truth. Thompson had it. Daniel Ellsburg had it. Malcolm X had it. Martin Luther King had it. What those in authority once said about them they say today about Snowden.”

Chris Hedges

27:43 “ Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOlg_2qAbUA” (2014)

“Democracy, in this late stage of capitalism, has been replaced with a system of legalized bribery. All branches of government, including the courts, along with the systems of entertainment and news, are wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state. Electoral politics are elaborate puppet shows.”

Chris Hedges

"Reform or Revolution" (2016)

“Liberalism, which Luxemburg called by its more appropriate name—“opportunism”—is an integral component of capitalism. When the citizens grow restive, it will soften and decry capitalism’s excesses. But capitalism, Luxemburg argued, is an enemy that can never be appeased. Liberal reforms are used to stymie resistance and then later, when things grow quiet, are revoked on the inevitable road to capitalist slavery. The last century of labor struggles in the United States provides a case study for proof of Luxemburg’s observation.The political, cultural and judicial system in a capitalist state is centered around the protection of property rights. And, as Adam Smith pointed out, when civil government “is instituted for the security of property, [it] is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” The capitalist system is gamed from the start. And this makes Luxemburg extremely relevant as corporate capital, now freed from all constraints, reconfigures our global economy, including the United States’, into a ruthless form of neofeudalism.”

Chris Hedges

"Reform or Revolution" (2016)

“Those rebels who rise up to try to wrest back power from despotic forces will endure not only the violence of the state, but the hatred and vigilante violence meted out by the self-deluded victims of exploitation. The systems of propaganda will relentlessly demonize those who resist.”

Chris Hedges

"The Illusion of Freedom" (2015)

“An omnipresent surveillance state … makes democratic dissent impossible. Any state that has the ability to inflict full spectrum dominance on its citizens is not a free state.”

Chris Hedges

29:29 “ Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOlg_2qAbUA” (2014)

“We live in an oligarchic state where we’ve been rendered utterly powerless. The judiciary, the legislative, the executive branch is all subservient to an oligarchic corporate elite. And the press is owned by an oligarchic corporate elite which makes sure that any critique of them is never broadcast over the airwaves.”

Chris Hedges

interviewed by Paul Jay, “The Pathology of the Super-Rich” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfmiCLYweTQ 4:45

“Hope will come with the return of the language of class conflict and rebellion, language that has been purged from the lexicon of the liberal class. This does not mean we have to agree with Karl Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a utopian mechanism led to another form of working class enslavement, but we have to learn again to speak in the vocabulary Marx employed. We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good.”

Chris Hedges

Source: The Death of the Liberal Class (2010), p. 17

“Contrary to the bunk we’re told, the United States didn’t land on Normandy and defeat Nazi Germany. The defeat of Nazi Germany was done primarily by the Soviet army.”

Chris Hedges

"Manufacturing War With Russia" (2019)

“It is used to demonize domestic critics and alternative media outlets as agents of a foreign power. It is used to paper over the Democratic Party’s betrayal of the working class and the party’s subservience to corporate power. It is used to discredit détente between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. It is used to justify both the curtailment of civil liberties in the United States and U.S. interventions overseas—including in countries such as Syria and Venezuela.”

Chris Hedges

"Manufacturing War With Russia" (2019)