Chris Hedges

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Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges

Christopher L. Hedges (born 18 September 1956 in St. Johnsbury, Vermont) is a journalist and author, specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and society.

Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, where he spent fifteen years.

Hedges was part of The New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism.

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[edit] Biography

Christopher Lynn Hedges was born in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, the son of a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Thomas Hedges. He graduated from the Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut in 1975. He has a B.A. in English Literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, where he studied under James Luther Adams.

In 1983, Hedges began his career reporting on the conflict in El Salvador. Following six years in Latin America, he took time off to study Arabic and then went to Jerusalem and later Cairo. He spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times. He left the Middle East in 1995 for Sarajevo to cover the war in Bosnia followed by the war in Kosovo. Later, he joined the investigative team of The New York Times, based in Paris, and covered terrorism.

He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University during the academic year of 1998-1999, and spent a year studying classics. In addition to English, he speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and knows Latin and ancient Greek. He has written for numerous publications including The Nation, Foreign Affairs, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Mother Jones, New Humanist and Truthdig where he currently writes a bi-weekly column.

Hedges was an early and vocal critic of the plan to invade and occupy Iraq. He questioned the rationale for war by the Bush administration and was critical of the early press coverage, calling it "shameful cheerleading".

On 2003-05-17, just 2 weeks after president George W. Bush's famous "Mission Accomplished" speech, Hedges delivered a Commencement address at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois, saying: "We are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige and power and security." Several hundred members of the audience booed and jeered his talk, although some applauded. Hedges' microphone was cut twice and two young men rushed the stage to try and prevent him from speaking. Hedges had to cut short his address and was escorted off campus by security officials before the ceremony was over. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal denounced Hedges for his anti-war stance. Hedges left The New York Times not long after this incident to become a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, write books and teach.

Hedges has stated that he is not a pacifist and supports humanitarian interventions, such as those in Bosnia and Kosovo, designed to stop campaigns of genocide. He nevertheless describes war as "the most potent narcotic invented by humankind".

Hedges states that his outlook is influenced by moral writers and ethicists such as George Orwell, Samuel Johnson, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Elias Canetti and theologians such as William Stringfellow, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Abraham Heschel, and Reinhold Niebuhr.

Hedges is married to the actor Eunice Wong and has three children, Thomas, Noëlle and Konrad. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

[edit] Books

[edit] War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002)

Hedges' bestselling War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning draws on his experiences in various conflicts to describe the patterns and behavior of nations and individuals in wartime. The book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

"War and conflict have marked most of adult life. I began covering insurgencies in El Salvador, where I spent five years, then on to Guatemala and Nicaragua and Colombia, through the first intifada in the West Bank and Gaza, the civil war in the Sudan and Yemen, the uprisings in Algeria and the Punjab, the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the Gulf War, the Kurdish rebellion in southeast Turkey and northern Iraq, the war in Bosnia, and finally Kosovo. I have been in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in the marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion following the Gulf War, strafed by Russian MIG-21s in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers, and shelled for days in Sarajevo with deafening rounds of heavy artillery that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments. I have seen too much of violent death. I have tasted too much of my own fear. I have painful memories that lie buried and untouched most of the time. It is never easy when they surface."

[edit] What Every Person Should Know About War (2003)

Hedges is also the author of What Every Person Should Know About War, a book he worked on with several combat veterans.

From the publisher:

"Chris Hedges offers a critical -- and fascinating -- lesson in the dangerous realities of our age: a stark look at the effects of war on combatants. Utterly lacking in rhetoric or dogma, this manual relies instead on bare fact, frank description, and a spare question-and-answer format. Hedges allows U.S. military documentation of the brutalizing physical and psychological consequences of combat to speak for itself."

[edit] Losing Moses on the Freeway (2005)

Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America was published in June 2005. The book was inspired by the Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski and his ten-part film series The Decalogue. Hedges wrote about lives, including his own, which had been consumed by one of the violations or issues raised by a commandment.

[edit] American Fascists (2007)

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America was published in January 2007. In this book, Hedges argues that the Christian fundamentalist movement emerging today in the United States resembles the early fascist movements in Italy and Germany at the beginning of the last century, and therefore constitutes a gathering threat to American democracy.

[edit] I Don't Believe in Atheists (2008)

Hedges' most recent book, I Don't Believe in Atheists, was published in March 2008. It critiques what it calls the radical mindset that rages against religion and faith.

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