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Chris Hedges
Foreign Correspondent & Author
Chris Hedges
Foreign Correspondent & Author
Biography
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, New York Times bestselling author, professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 11 books, including the New York Times best-seller Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012), which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco. His other books include America: The Farewell Tour (2019), Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of 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). His book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and has sold over 400,000 copies. He writes a weekly column for the web site Truthdig in Los Angeles, run by Robert Scheer, and hosts a show, On Contact, on RT America.
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 during his work 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 a New York Times team of reporters awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. Hedges speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and studied classics, including ancient Greek and Latin, at Harvard University.
Hedges has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto. He currently teaches a class through Princeton University at a state prison in New Jersey where half of the students are Princeton undergraduates and half are prisoners.
Hedges began his career reporting on the Falkland War from Argentina for National Public Radio. He went on to cover the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua for five years, first for The Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio and later The Dallas Morning News. After six years in Latin America, he took time off to study Arabic. He spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the bureau chief 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 was based in Paris as part of the team covering al-Qaeda and global terrorism. He left the Times after receiving a formal reprimand from the newspaper for publicly denouncing the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.
In 2012, Hedges successfully sued President Barack Obama over section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which overturned the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the military from acting as a domestic police force. Section 1021 gives the military the authority to indefinitely detain and deny due process to U.S. citizens who are branded by the state as terrorists. The decision was overturned on appeal by the Obama administration. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the ruling, known as Hedges v. Obama, in 2014.
Hedges holds a B.A. in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University. He spent a year studying classics at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif. In 2014 he was ordained as a minister for social witness at the Second Presbyterian Church in Elizabeth, N.J. The theologian James Cone, the father of Black Liberation Theology, preached the sermon along with Cornel West. The ordination was approved for his work in New Jersey prisons where Hedges has taught college credit courses for nearly a decade.
Speech Topics
The Cultural Embrace of Illusion & the Society of Spectacle
Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil holds that only a few people have the fortitude to look in times of distress into what he calls the molten pit of human reality. Most studiously ignore the pit. Artists and philosophers, for Nietzsche, are consumed, however, by an insatiable curiosity, a quest for truth and desire for meaning. They venture down into the bowels of the molten pit. They get as close as they can before the flames and heat drive them back. This intellectual and moral honesty, Nietzsche wrote, comes with a cost. Those singed by the fire of reality become “burnt children,” he wrote, eternal orphans in empires of illusion. Dying civilizations always make war on independent intellectual inquiry, art and culture for this reason. They do not want the masses to look into the pit. They condemn and vilify the “burnt people” — from Julian Assange to the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, Rober Hallam, who is serving a five year prison term for nonviolent civil disobedience. They feed the human addiction for illusion, happiness and the mania for hope. They peddle the fantasy of eternal material progress and the cult of the self. They insist -- and this is the argument of neoliberalism -- that the ruling ideology, one posited on ceaseless exploitation and ever-expanding accumulation that funnels money upwards into the hand of a global billionaire class, is decreed by natural law.
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