Chris Hedges: The World As It Is: Dispatches on Myth of Human Progress May 2, 2011

Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges writes a hugely influential weekly column for the progressive news site Truthdig. In it he discusses many of the most urgent issues of our times-including our imperial wars in the Middle East, the problems of peace in Israel and Palestine, and the abject failure of American liberalism in the face of the corporate takeover of the American government. This collection of essays, The World As It Is, draws on the unique experiences of a deeply educated individual -a student of Christian ethics and the classics at Harvard - who has spent nearly twenty years as a foreign correspondent in the most troubled areas of Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans.

Chris Hedges is a fellow of The Nation Institute. He spent fifteen years reporting for the New York Times. He is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, American Fascists, Empire of Illusion, I Don't Believe in Atheists, and Death of the Liberal Class. Currently he writes for Harper's, The New York Review of Books, Granta and Mother Jones- as well as Truthdig.

He insists that unless we begin to stand fast around moral imperatives, ones we cannot abandon while remaining willing to fight the formal systems of power, we will be complicit in our self-annihilation. "As the centers of American power were seized and hijacked by corporations, the media continued to pay deference to systems of power that could no longer be considered honest or democratic. The media treat criminals on Wall Street as responsible members of the ruling class. They treat the criminals in the White House and the Pentagon as statesmen."

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